pLOG

2024-01-17

Are patients always disobedient? How do Patient Support Programs improve medical compliance?

Clinical studies in modern healthcare have shown that Patient Support Programs (PSPs) have a significant impact on improving medication adherence and enhancing medical outcomes. These programs focus on the care needs of patients outside of the hospital setting, providing personalized care, effective communication channels, medication adherence strategies, and comprehensive health education to enhance patients' understanding of their health and promote collaborative management between patients and healthcare providers.

Research by Diana Brixner et al. indicates that PSPs involving professional nurses can significantly improve medication adherence rates, resulting in overall reduction in healthcare costs despite increased medication expenses. However, the impact of PSPs on medication adherence varies depending on the program, thus requiring the application of behavioral science theories and digital technologies to enhance program effectiveness. Medication non-adherence poses significant cost pressures on healthcare systems; in the United States alone, non-adherence to prescribed treatments results in wastage of up to $290 billion.

Patients have various reasons for not adhering to prescribed treatments, such as financial issues, lack of understanding about the disease, choosing to ignore the treatment, forgetting to take medications, or family factors. PSPs employ a variety of strategies to help patients adhere to their treatments, including providing disease information, medication management, lifestyle adjustments, and emotional support. With the introduction of digital healthcare monitoring tools and artificial intelligence (AI), PSPs are becoming more personalized, able to provide information and positive guidance based on individual case scenarios, thereby improving communication effectiveness.

The development of digital healthcare monitoring tools, including recent interventions with AI tools, has expanded the scope of PSP services beyond merely reacting to patient abnormalities to predicting patient behaviors and intervening in management proactively. However, if not designed properly, the value of AI prediction in PSP management remains controversial. The use of AI prediction makes PSP management more personalized, determining information communication and positive guidance based on individual information and behavior, leading to better communication outcomes.

Consideration of using continuous messaging to help patients manage diseases and treatments, and providing cross-channel services via smartphones, tablets, or computers greatly enhances patients' medication adherence. This opens up new perspectives for PSPs and provides a method to address medication non-adherence issues, allowing the active influence of healthcare providers to extend into patients' daily lives.

The PATIENTSFORCE's Patient Support Program utilizes integrated care services through voice messages and LINE messages, and has been implemented in care plans for specific diseases, achieving medication adherence rates of over 90-98%. This enables the care team to more effectively assist patients in adhering to medical prescriptions, thereby collecting information on ongoing care and allowing physicians to better understand patients' physical and mental conditions and medication usage during follow-up visits, thus improving patient medication adherence.

President of PATIENTSFORCE, Sean Chang 
sean.chang@media-wind.com.tw

參考資料來源


  • Brixner D, Rubin DT, Mease P, Mittal M, Liu H, Davis M, Ganguli A, Fendrick AM. Patient Support Program Increased Medication Adherence with Lower Total Health Care Costs Despite Increased Drug Spending. J Manag Care Spec Pharm. 2019 Jul;25(7):770-779. doi: 10.18553/jmcp.2019.18443. Epub 2019 May 11. PMID: 31081461; PMCID: PMC10398065.