Dec
24
The Key to Patient Adherence to Complex Treatments
Filed Under Burnout, Patient Adherence | Leave a Comment
According to a whitepaper authored by Frost & Sullivan, it’s deep understanding. Targeted education (materials that take into account standard variables such as age, gender, and race) is no longer good enough. If you want patients to stay on their treatment regimens, you’ve got to understand their lifestyle issues, the benefits and risks they see as a result of taking the medication, and the specific barriers to compliance they face.
“Driving patients’ adherence to medication requires an emphasis on the patient’s individual barriers to compliance and persistency. The need for this tailored approach is critical for some chronic conditions such as asthma, hypertension, diabetes and osteoporosis that call for significant lifestyle changes, and have complex, long-term treatment regimens.”
In other words–tailored education is wired, targeted education is tired.
F&S’s prescription:
‘Pharmaceutical manufacturers should collaborate with physicians to assess the patient’s understanding of their illness and recommended therapy, communicate the benefits of treatment, assess the patient’s readiness to carry out the plan, and discuss any barriers to adherence that patients have.”
Here’s the problem, the discussions that Frost & Sullivan recommend are not the discussions that doctors (or nurses for that matter) are trained to have in medical school. And they require some modicum of skill and thought, and not for the reason you’d think.
It would be easy to believe that practitioners, as compassionate as they are, need to learn to tease tender insights from patients reluctant to reveal intimacies. Turns out, it often doesn’t work that way.
In a previous post, I mentioned a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine this year that showed that physicians miss as much as 90% of the personal overtures offered by patients. Practitioners tend to steer the conversation away from personal issues that bear on adherence, and toward symptoms and diagnoses.
Tim’s Takeaway: This is great advice from Frost & Sullivan, and well researched. The challenge is making these conversations happen between patients and practitioners. Pharma can develop all the ultra-tailored info they want. If practitioners don’t respond when patients bring up problems, it’s just more trees cut down to create literature that never leaves the info stands in the doctor’s office.
Written by Tim Dawes - Visit Website