"Tomorrow's Technology Today" about SIMpill:
 | |  | |  |
- C. Everett Koop, MD, former US Surgeon General
The Effects of Patient Non-compliance...
Medication adherence (compliance) is defined as the extent to which patients take medications as prescribed (# times per
day for a period of time) by their health care providers. Because it impedes the healing potential of virtually all modern
medical advances, non-adherent patient behavior may be the single most important challenge faced by health care
practitioners today. Patient non-adherence has been called by medical industry experts as “the Achilles heel of modern
health care.”
According to the August 2005 “Medication Adherence” peer-reviewed article published in the New England Journal of
Medicine:
- Common barriers to adherence are: forgetfulness (30%), other priorities (16%), deliberate decision (11%),
emotional factors (7%). 27% had no reason.
- Average adherence rates for patients participating in clinical trials are generally higher because of the additional
attention patients receive and the scrutiny of selection criteria. However, even in clinical trials, adherence rates
range from only 43% to 78% among patients receiving treatment for chronic conditions, despite the fact that the
consequences of non-adherence are typically more severe.
- Adherence rates are generally higher among patients with acute conditions as compared to those with chronic
conditions. The worst cases of non-adherence are for preventive regimens or patients who are asymptomatic.
Persistence among patients with chronic conditions is disappointingly low, dropping most dramatically after six
months of therapy.
According to the 2005 market research study, “Pharmaceutical Patient Compliance and Disease Management – The
Cost of Noncompliance” by Cutting Edge Information:
- Up to 85% of patients do not refill prescriptions and complete their treatment regimens.
- 10% to 20% of initial prescriptions go unfilled
- Up to 20% of all hospital and nursing home admissions and 125,000 deaths annually are attributed to non-
compliance
- The pharmaceutical industry loses nearly $8 billion in revenue each year based upon patients never filling or
refilling their prescriptions.
Further supporting the issue, according to the 2000 article “Medication Non-adherence: Finding Solutions to a Costly
Medical Problem,” in Drug Benefit Trends:
- 50% of the patients for whom appropriate medication is prescribed fail to receive the full benefits because of
inadequate adherence to treatment.
- 20% to 80% of patients make errors in taking medication and that 20% to 60% stop taking medications before
being instructed to do so.
- The best compliers were approximately 70 years old; the worst compliers were patients younger than 55 years
and those older than 80 years.
Pharmacists, and Home
Care Professionals.
click here
Copyright © 2006 Clinical Technology Advisors, Inc. All Rights Reserved. SIMpill is a registered trademark of SIMpill (Pty.) Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
