Reevaluating medication adherence in the era of digital health

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ABSTRACT

Introduction

Medication adherence is a worldwide issue impacting more than half the population. The cost associated with nonadherence is tremendous and has spurred the growth of novel technologies to address this growing problem.

Areas covered

This perspective covers the different digital health medication adherence tools that have come to market in the past decade and their clinical impact. These digital interventions and their applicability to medication adherence across different stakeholders are then evaluated.

Expert opinion

Digital health will play a significant role in creating new pathways to care in the 2020s. However, the current design of medication adherence tools has not demonstrated a clinical impact that will be relevant for the digital health space without a change in redesign factoring in relevant stakeholders’ incentives to address adherence issues. A focus on only adherence has not yielded the economic or clinical benefit as expected, which is likely due to a lack of focus on broader drug-related problems (DRPs) that are causative factors beyond adherence alone. As such, adherence tools will see disparate uptake, likely due to condition-specific interventions rather than adherence issues as a whole, and future endeavors will need to address the larger DRP considerations to actualize clinical outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital health
• mhealth
• medication adherence
• sensor
• remote patient monitoring
• inhaler
• injectable

Article Highlights

• Medication adherence data is sporadic and has not seen substantial research across the breath of adherence for several decades

• Digital health has increased an interest in the integration of technology across health care and medication adherence has been an area of focus

• Medication adherence innovation using novel technology has spread across multiple possible interventions with mixed data demonstrating clinical impact

• Current stakeholders will require some incentive to adopt novel adherence solutions

• Medication optimization using digital health tools should be the emphasized role of technological adoption rather than a focus on adherence alone

Additional information

Funding

This paper was not funded.