2017 Volume 12 Issue 2 Pages 9-18
Medication adherence is a significant foundation of medical therapy. However, some research have shown that almost half of patients do not completely take the prescribed medication. The aim of this study was to assess the effect of the “medication reminder alarm” as our smartphone application for medication adherence.
A total of 201 monitors were assigned to four groups, and each group used the “medication reminder alarm” for dif-ferent time period. In these experiments, monitors opened a package in imitation of dosing three times a day for 4 weeks, and we compared the adherence rates between each of the different groups.
In the same group, the adherence rates in the period in which the monitors used the “medication reminder alarm” were significantly higher than those in the period in which they did not use the alarm. In addition, the group that used the “medication reminder alarm” for 4 weeks kept high adherence rates throughout all the experiments. In contrast, the group that used the “medication reminder alarm” for the first 2 weeks exhibited significantly lower the adherence rates than those of the last 2 weeks.
These results indicate that our “medication reminder alarm” effectively increased the adherence rates, indicating that this application could be a useful tool to increase medication adherence in patients in routine clinical practice.
