Overcoming Barriers to Medication Adherence for Chronic Diseases

What recommendations you could make to empower patients to be more personally responsible for the care they receive?

• Examples
  • Lower insurance premiums
  • Patient receive reimbursement for meds they take

That’s an interesting way of phrasing the question. As health care providers, it is difficult to hold patients responsible for their adherence in a way that penalizes them. In order to do so, we would first need to have reliable and valid methods to measure adherence in the clinical setting. Patients pay the price for poor adherence through poorly controlled symptoms and worse health outcomes. It’s possible that some patients aren’t aware of their poor adherence or don’t cognitively link medication adherence with their health outcomes. This may then negatively impact the patients’ motivation & intention to adhere to their medication regimens.

Some patients are making decisions to be non-adherent for a variety of reasons such as side-effects or medication costs. Many of the efforts to change this type of non-adherence seem to be focused on providing additional information to patients or to increased surveillance to check whether the medication is being taken. Unfortunately, better information about the importance of adherence does not make the medication more affordable. What psychological or behavioral interventions are underway to affect the decision-making and motivational processes that lead patients to be non-adherent?

I agree with your assessment that education or even behavioral health interventions won't actually address the root causes of non-adherence. So I discuss ways to mitigate side effects or alternative treatments, or ways to reduce costs (cheaper pharmacies, splitting pills, non-medication interventions, discount websites, pharma discount programs, etc...).