Your HRT questions, answered.
Straight answers about HRT reminders, complex schedules, tracking your symptoms, talking to your doctor, and your privacy — from the woman who built HRTMe.
HRTMe is a medication reminder and wellbeing tracking tool. It doesn’t give medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always follow your prescribing clinician’s instructions — for general information on HRT, see the NHS guide to HRT.
Why I built this (the short version)
I made HRTMe because I was on HRT myself and couldn't find anything that actually understood it. I'm a software technical professional, I DJ house music, I've got a busy life — and at one of the hardest times in it, while one of my parents was terminally ill and trying not to drop the ball on my own treatment, I needed something that just worked. Nothing did. So I built it. First for me, then my sister, then my friends, and now for all of us. Everything below is the stuff I wished someone had explained to me.
Getting started — how the app actually works
You pick your medication — ideally by brand — and HRTMe builds the schedule for you. Tell it you're on Evorel Sequi or Utrogestan or Oestrogel and it already knows the shape of that regimen: how often, which days, how the phases change. You're not building a schedule from scratch; you're confirming the one you've been prescribed. Setup takes a couple of minutes, not an evening.
No. No account, no sign-up, no password, no email. You open the app and start. Your data lives on your phone, not on someone's server (more on that in Privacy below). I deliberately built it this way — your HRT is nobody else's business.
Yes, it's free to download and set up your medications and reminders. Some of the deeper insight features sit behind a subscription, but the core job — never missing a dose — is free.
It's built to be the opposite of fiddly. Honestly — when you've got brain fog, the last thing you need is a complicated app. If you can tap "I've taken it," you can use HRTMe.
HRT & your medication
All of the common ones: patches, gels, sprays, tablets, pessaries, creams, capsules, implants, injections, and hormonal coils. Oestrogen, progesterone, combined — whatever you've been prescribed. Most women are on more than one thing at once, so HRTMe lets you track several medications together, each with its own schedule and reminders.
Because a phone alarm just nags you — it doesn't understand HRT. A generic pill reminder doesn't know that your patch changes twice a week, that your progesterone only runs for part of your cycle, or that you want to see whether any of it is actually helping. HRTMe was built for HRT specifically, by someone on it, me! That's the whole point.
Yes. Reminders respect your sleep — you set the hours you don't want to be disturbed, and it won't ping you in the middle of the night. You can also see your next dose on your Home Screen and on your Apple Watch without opening the app at all.
Simple schedules
Not at all — simple is welcome here. Set your daily tablet, choose a reminder time, done. You'll get a nudge when it's due, you tap to confirm, and that's it. The clever stuff is there if you ever want it, but it stays out of your way.
Yes. Twice-weekly and weekly patch patterns are built in — pick your brand and it knows the rhythm (for example, change days twice a week). You get a reminder on the right days to swap your patch, so you're never counting on your fingers trying to remember if today's a change day.
Yes — that's one of the simplest ways to use HRTMe. Pick your patch brand and it sets the change days for you, then reminds you on the right day (and on your Apple Watch) to swap it. You can use it purely as an HRT patch reminder if that's all you want, and add symptom tracking later — or never.
Complex schedules — the reason this app exists
Yes — this is exactly what HRTMe was built for. Sequential and phased regimens, where you change medication or strength partway through your cycle, are first-class here. You set up the phases once (or pick a brand that already has them, like Evorel Sequi or Femoston), and the app guides you through each phase and reminds you when one changes. This is the part most other apps simply can't do.
Completely. That's the normal case, not the edge case — most of us are juggling more than one. Oestrogen gel daily, a progesterone capsule for part of the cycle, a patch twice a week — HRTMe holds all of it at once, each on its own schedule, and shows you what's due next without you having to hold it all in your head.
It does more than a calendar — and that's the reason I built it the way I did. HRTMe has a proper cycle and period view, but your medications are anchored to your cycle, not pinned to fixed calendar dates. So when life moves — your period comes early, your cycle shifts — you change one date and every reminder moves with it. Your progesterone, your phase changes, all of it re-flows automatically. With an ordinary calendar app you'd be recalculating dates and dragging every entry across by hand; here it's a single edit.
Yes. If your regimen doesn't match a standard template, there's a custom "it varies" setup with a phase builder, so you can describe your actual cycle — which medication, which days, how it changes — rather than forcing it into a box. It started because my sister's regimen was complicated, then friends had even more complex ones, and I kept building until it could handle real life. You can set breaks, you create multiple phases, medications can even follow different cycles if you need to.
It means you choose your actual prescribed brand and HRTMe sets up the regimen for you. You shouldn't have to know the clinical shape of your schedule — that's the app's job. Pick the brand on your prescription and the days, phases and frequency come pre-filled, ready for you to confirm.
Most of the common UK ones — patches like Evorel, Estradot and FemSeven; gels like Oestrogel and Sandrena; the Lenzetto spray; Utrogestan and other progesterones (including generic micronised progesterone); combined and sequential tablets like Femoston, Kliovance and Elleste; tibolone; the Mirena coil; and vaginal oestrogens — plus a US set. If your exact brand isn't there, or your regimen is unusual, you can still build it with the custom setup. (Full list on the Brands page.)
Taking a dose late, missing one, or changing your dose
First: don't panic. In the app, you just mark it as taken when you do it, and it's logged with the time. Taking it late doesn't shift your whole schedule around — your next reminder stays on its normal cadence, so one late dose doesn't knock everything off. (For what a late dose means medically, always check your own clinician's advice — that's not something an app should tell you.)
Yes. Anything overdue shows up clearly on your dashboard so you can catch up at a glance — mark it taken if you've done it, or clear it if you genuinely skipped. Over time you also get an honest picture of your on-time rate, which is far more useful than guessing "I think I'm pretty good at it."
This is one of my favourite things about it. So many of us get told "try three pumps instead of two and see how you go" — and then we've got no real way to tell if it helped, beyond a vague feeling weeks later. Because HRTMe logs your symptoms and wellbeing every day, you can update your dose and then look back at your charts to see how you were feeling before the change and after it. It's your own record, in your own hands, instead of trying to remember at your next appointment.
Yes — strengths are free text, so something like "50mcg E2 + 170mcg NETA" or "two pumps" is stored exactly as it is. HRT strengths aren't tidy numbers and the app doesn't pretend they are.
Symptoms & wellbeing — and why everyone's different
Any symptoms, you can add as may as you like. The common menopause ones are built in — hot flushes, night sweats, joint and muscle pain, sleep problems,anxiety, heart palpitations, headaches, lowered sex drive, irritability, and difficulty concentrating. You log them with a quick daily tap. It takes seconds.
Yes — side effects are just symptoms, and HRTMe is built to track them. Whether something is part of your menopause or a reaction to a new dose or brand, you log it the same way: a quick daily tap. Because you're logging every day, you can look back and see whether a side effect started when something changed — then take that to your doctor. (HRTMe doesn't give medical advice on side effects; anything that worries you, check with your clinician.)
Yes — and as someone who's tried to run a technical career through it, this one matters to me. Alongside mood and energy, HRTMe has a dedicated mental-clarity check-in, from crystal clear to very foggy, so you can actually watch your brain fog over time instead of just suffering through it and forgetting how bad last month was. "Difficulty concentrating" is in the symptom list too.
Then add your own. You can create your own custom symptoms (up to six), because no preset list ever covers everyone — HRT and menopause show up differently in every single one of us. If the thing bothering you isn't a standard tick-box, track it anyway.
No. A quick daily tap on how you're feeling — mood, energy, clarity, any symptoms — is all it needs. You can do the whole check-in in well under a minute, including from your wrist on the Apple Watch.
Seeing patterns you'd never spot on paper
Because a notebook can't show you a pattern — it just buries it. HRTMe turns your logs into charts and then pulls the patterns out for you: which days in your cycle tend to be your worst, whether your sleep and your anxiety keep turning up together, whether this month has been better or worse than last. I kept symptoms on paper for years and never once spotted a pattern. The app does it in a glance.
Yes — it shows you the symptoms that tend to show up on the same days, so you can see, for instance, that your headaches and your night sweats keep landing together. It's not making clinical claims; it's just reflecting your own logs back to you in a way you can actually read.
It does. Looking across your cycle, the app highlights the days that tend to be your better ones and the ones that tend to be tougher — based purely on what you've logged. It's your own data, organised so the shape of your month finally makes sense.
Not today — right now it isn't AI at all. It picks out the real patterns in your logs and highlights them — your most-logged symptom, whether you're logging more or fewer than last month, your best and worst days, which symptoms tend to occur together — but that's straightforward maths on your own data, not a black box guessing about your health. And here's my actual red line, whatever I build next: your data stays on your phone and is never sent off to be fed into a cloud AI or large language model. If I ever add anything smarter, it'll run on your device, on your data — your HRT is never going to be training someone else's AI.
Your doctor & your appointment
Yes, and it's one of the most useful things you can do with it. HRTMe generates a one-tap GP report — a clean PDF of your medications, how consistently you've taken them, your wellbeing trends, your bleeding, and your main symptoms over a date range. You can email it, save it to Files, or print it.
Because it means you spend those ten minutes on decisions, not on trying to recap six months from memory while the clock ticks. You walk in with evidence — "here's what I'm on, here's how consistently, here's how I've actually been feeling" — instead of "I think the night sweats are maybe a bit better?" It changes the conversation.
Bring specifics, not impressions. Take your GP report so you've got dates, doses and symptom trends in front of you. Note the things you most want to change (for example, "the brain fog is my biggest issue" or "I want to try a different progesterone"). And if you changed something — a dose, the timing — show the before and after from your charts. Doctors can do far more with a clear record than with a vague memory, and you'll feel far more in control walking in with one.
Apple Watch
Two things, both quick: see your next medication with a live countdown and mark it taken from your wrist, and do a fast wellbeing check-in — mood, energy, brain fog and symptoms — using the Digital Crown. No phone needed in the moment; it syncs back automatically. Being able to log a hot flush the second it happens, without digging your phone out, genuinely makes the data better.
Privacy & your data
On your phone. Your medications, symptoms and wellbeing live in your device's own secure storage, not on a server I can see. No account, no cloud profile, nothing for anyone to leak.
That's optional and off until you switch it on. If you turn it on, HRTMe keeps a backup in your own private iCloud — your Apple account, not mine — so you can restore onto a new phone. It's your copy in your ecosystem, never mine.
Never. No ads, no tracking pixels, no data selling — and no deals with health companies or big pharma to hand over what you log. Your health data is also never sent off to be fed into an AI. There are anonymous usage statistics so I can tell which screens need work, but they contain no health data whatsoever — no symptoms, no moods, no medication names, nothing about your health.
Because it's HRT. It's menopause. It's your body and your medication, and the world does not need a copy. I built this for women, and I'd want my own data treated exactly this way — so that's how I treat yours.
Draft v1 — review for voice and accuracy, then I'll build it into a proper FAQ page with FAQ schema for search/AI visibility.
Keep reading
- See the HRT brands we set up for you — Evorel, Oestrogel, Utrogestan and more.
- How HRTMe works — the HRT reminder app for women, built by a woman on HRT.