Did you know that…
- Up to 50% of patients do not take their
prescribed medication?
- Up to 10% of all hospital admissions are due
to medication-related problems including those caused by drugs not being
taken, or being taken incorrectly?
- That the cost of patients not following their
prescribed treatment regime correctly is estimated to cost health care
systems around the world over $300bn annually?
The term used to describe the correct taking of a prescribed course of
medical treatment is ‘medical adherence’. Poor medical adherence is a big
problem – described by the WHO as ‘a worldwide problem of striking magnitude’.
The Centre for Business Innovation Medical Adherence Consortium is a
group of organisations all of whom have an interest in the problem of poor
medical adherence and a shared belief that technology might be a part of the
solution. This group met for the first time at BUPA House in London towards the
end of February. Organisations as diverse as BUPA, GlaxoSmithKline, AbbVie, Tunstall,
Janssen, Proteus Digital Health, NICE and others discussed the key areas that
need to be addressed if progress is to be made in this difficult area.
The group identified areas where common obstacles to improving poor
adherence are thought to lie including:
- Economic / financial considerations: ensuring
that good adherence makes economic sense for all actors.
- Standardisation: agreement around terminology,
identification of gaps in information and other standards and planning to
address these.
- Regulation: identification of key obstacles to
improved adherence associated with regulation and determine the best way
of engaging with the regulator to jointly determine if and how these might
be addressed.
- "Case studies": identification and
dissemination of success stories to encourage wider engagement with the
subject of adherence.
- Measurement / data: understanding problems
around measurement of adherence, identifying and disseminating baseline
measurements, agreeing standard approaches to measurement.
- Sustainability: ensuring that any adherence
approaches are not only affordable but are sustainable for the long term.
Future meetings will develop these themes and look to make concrete
progress in each of them – helping to address some of the problems preventing progress
in the difficult area of medical adherence.
