Promoting Adherence to Improve Effectiveness of Cardiovascular Disease Therapies

The frequent failure of patients to adhere to long-term medication regimens remains the
single greatest challenge for chronic-disease management. Many studies have linked
medication non-adherence to treatment failure; unnecessary and dangerous intensification of
therapy; and excess health care costs, hospitalizations, and deaths. Although some
interventions have been shown to significantly enhance medication adherence, the strategies
used are often complex, labor-intensive, and of variable effectiveness. Simple interventions
designed to make small-but-significant improvements in population-based adherence may thus
offer a novel, cost-effective, and easily-disseminated alternative to current approaches for
enhancing adherence. The proposed PATIENT study will use health information technology
(automated phone calls and access to an electronic medical record) to test two such
interventions and compare them to each other and to usual care alone.