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Being ill is hard. In order for a patient to feel better, he or she must follow the treatment suggested by his or her physician. This willingness to cooperate ensures that the patient is healthier, experiences a higher quality of life, has greater symptomatic relief, and requires less interventional care from unscheduled ER visits and nursing assistance.

What Does Effective Adherence Management Involve?
Effective adherence management involves educating and engaging the patient. By making them an active participant in the therapy process, physicians can help their patients improve their health as well as clinical outcomes. Although this may appear to be an easy task, it is not due to the sheer number of patients requiring care.

Sadly, it is difficult for healthcare providers to administer effective adherence management because they are either:

a) forced to scale back to efficiently deal with current workloads

b) hire additional care support specialists to meet needs, or

c) find a more effective way to generate reports than surveys administered by care support specialists or sent through the mail.

How Does It Benefit Organizations?
Improved and demonstrable patient adherence ensures better care and lower medical cost. Unnecessary hospitalizations, ER visits, nursing home admissions, and excess consumption of interventional treatments become fewer and less expensive.  This is good news for both patient and physician.

Enrollment and Maintenance, an Effective Approach
Engaging plan participants involves three steps. This is an effective way to promote compliance. Here they are:

1. Awareness of programs - Patients should know that wellness and disease management programs exist. Without this knowledge, they are not able to take part of treatments.
2. Enrollment of patients and members - Patients or members can be enrolled quickly and without the hassle of long forms or impatient call center employees.  This opens up the arena for questioning. Patients are at ease and can obtain the information that they are looking for.
3. Ongoing engagement - Once the patient or member is engaged and adherent, the physician will want to keep them this way. They will want to continue to take an interest in their health and the maintenance of it.

Why Patients Fail to Take Their Prescribed Medications
Although it can be a variety of factors, here are a few of the reasons why patients state they do not take their prescribed medications:

• Forgetfulness (30 percent)
• Other priorities (16 percent)
• Decision to omit doses (11 percent)
• Lack of information (9 percent)
• Emotional factors (7 percent)
• No reason (27 percent)

Based on these answers, the four common areas to improve adherence include patient education, revised dosing schedules, increased hours when the clinic is open along with shorter waiting times, and improved communications between physicians and patients.

Three Secondary but Crucial Criteria
Three secondary but crucial criteria include:

• Multi-lingual capabilities - Being able to effectively communication in a number of different languages is beneficial.
• Multi-channel capabilities - Different channels such as cell phones, emails, and text messages improve communication because it appeals to other people.
• Decisioning capabilities - Intervention strategy can be catered to the patient's needs as well as actual patient response data.

Treatment adherence results when patients and physicians feel comfortable in one another's presence. This allows them to forge a relationship that is built on trust. Once diagnosed with an illness, patients should be given the information that they need to maintain a healthier and happier lifestyle. Part of this education should include a lesson about how important treatments are and how adherence can improve the quality of their lives.

Varolii automates the patient outreach process, using any communication device, and personalizes messages that allow the patient to respond and take action. Our personalized messages to patients and members help efficiently monitor progress and manage care, effectively triage for intervention, and optimize care support resources. Keep in mind that the primary focus of all these efforts towards automating the engagement process are driving towards the goal of healthier patients, superior clinical outcomes, improved economic outcomes and better HEDIS scores. If you would like to learn more about of progressive engagement products, please visit our healthcare solutions.

You can also read the full whitepaper about Communications Therapy Improving Treatment Adherence.