Was that take with food—or without?

That’s the kind of question anyone who’s been on a prescription regimen can relate to—unless you’ve got a photographic memory.

But Roseville’s Billy Blackwell can’t simply reference the directions bottle.

For 20 years, Blackwell, 73, has been legally blind. That means he must rely on caretakers to administer his prescriptions correctly.

But a special pill bottle used by Kaiser Permanente has made it easier for Blackwell and others in the same boat to take their drugs safely when they can’t read the label.

Called, appropriately enough, the “talking pill bottle,” the free service encodes a pharmacist’s voice into a microchip that can then be played back at home with the push of a button.

“We actually read everything that would be on a normal prescription label into that recorder,” said Kaiser pharmacy supervisor Kathy Peters. “When they pick up their bottle they push the button and it tells them exactly what’s in there.”

That includes the name of the medicine, prescription number, side effects and refill information – up to 60 seconds.

The focus, she said, is on safety. If patients don’t know what’s on the label, they could be at higher risk of overdosing or taking the pill at the wrong time.

Patients at Sutter Roseville Medical Center can also be prescribed talking pill bottles through an outside pharmacy, a spokeswoman said.

“In our business you have a lot of patients that have issues with maybe their hearing or their vision,” Peters said. “And those patients need to have access to their medical information like everybody else.”

The encoded information doesn’t replace the person-to-person talk from a pharmacist when a patient picks up a prescription, Peters said. But she added some patients who could use the devices don’t know about it.

“There are people out there,” she said.