A systematic review of the cost-effectiveness of medicationadherence-enhancing intervention for asthma

Abstract

Objective: This systematic review aimed to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of medication adherence-improving interventions in patients with asthma.

Data source: Search engines including PubMed, Scopus and EBSCOhost were used to locate relevant studies from the inception of the databases to 19 October 2018. Drummond’s checklist was used to appraise the quality of the economic evaluation.

Study selection: Economic studies evaluating the cost-effectiveness of medication adherence enhancing interventions for asthmatic patients were selected. Relevant information including study characteristics, quality assessment, health outcomes and costs of intervention were narratively summarized. The primary outcome of interest was cost-effectiveness (CE) values and the secondary outcomes were costs, medication adherence and clinical consequences.

Results: Twenty studies including 11 randomized controlled trials, 6 comparative studies and 3 modeled studies using Markov models were included in the review. Among these, 15 studies evaluated an educational intervention with 13 showing cost-effectiveness in improving health outcomes. The CE of an internet-based intervention showed similar results between groups, while 3 studies of simplified drug regimens and adding a technology-based training program achieved the desirable cost-effectiveness outcome.

Conclusion: Overall, our results would support that all of the identified medication adherence-enhancing interventions were cost-effective considering the increased adherence rate, improved clinical effectiveness and the reduced costs of asthma care. However, it was not possible to identify the most cost-effective intervention. More economic studies with sound methodological conduct will be needed to provide stronger evidence in deciding the best approach to improve medication adherence.

Keywords:

• Cost-effectiveness analysis
• medication adherence
• patient compliance
• asthma
• systematic review

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the kind assistance in proofreading and editing the manuscript by Dr. Irene Munro from the Discipline of Pharmacy and Experimental Pharmacology, School of Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy at the University of Newcastle.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sector.