Improving Medication Adherence with Tech-Enabled PSP

Medication non-adherence, defined as the non-continuance or irregular uptake of medicine, is a huge problem globally and leads to negative health outcomes in any patient support program. It affects both educated and non-educated communities, though it could be higher in the latter. We couldn’t find any nation-wide study for medication adherence in India.

However, a study in Rural Karnataka placed the medication adherence in diabetic patients to be as low as 51%. This matches the medication adherence in the US for chronic illnesses (also around 50%). Anti-hypertensive medication non-adherence is, however, more prevalent in low- to middle-income countries, such as India, nearly 4 times the number from high-income countries, such as the USA.

Why Do We Need to Improve Medication Adherence?

Improving adherence is recognized as an impactful and cost-effective way to improve a population’s health and the effectiveness of a patient support program. Improvement in medication adherence also leads to the overall success of a patient support program, increasing the reputation of a pharma company and the associated healthcare providers, increasing patient comfort levels and longevity and reducing healthcare costs in the long-term. ?

Reasons for Poor Medication Adherence in India: Could PSP Help?

In India, several barriers to medication non-adherence have been identified across the five dimensions of adherence defined by WHO. The key reasons for poor adherence in India are poor understanding of the disease due to low rates of health literacy, poor accessibility to healthcare, inability to afford medical care, anxiety-associated hesitancy driven by fear of adverse effects, patient forgetfulness, aversion to medical systems or medicines, and stigmatization.

In this study, mentioned earlier, gender of the patient also played a role in medication adherence, with women being more compliant than men. However, no other study was found to arrive at a such a conclusion. According to a 2023 review of several studies conducted over a period of nearly 13 years, open patient–provider communication with a focus on educating people about their illnesses and promoting follow-ups for continued care can be highly beneficial in ensuring medication adherence in a country like India.

Achieving Medication Adherence: PSPs Can Help

Traditional strategies mediated by healthcare providers require additional infrastructure or call for personalization, to be cost-effective at scale. This is where a technology-driven patient support program controlled by a third party can change the game, reducing stress on healthcare infrastructure and achieving the key element of personalization that is so crucial to the success of any customer-centric program, particularly a patient support program.

How Tech Can Improve a PSP’s Benefits

A patient support program itself improves medical adherence. With the assistance of tech, a patient support program can improve it further.

Intelligent CRMs make patient lives easy

There are several advancements in tech that are making this possible, but probably the one with far-reaching consequences to medication adherence in a patient support program is the growth of AI and CRM, leading to widespread automation.

They are getting widely used in self-service portals by patients or by nurses or other healthcare professionals on their behalf:

1. Make appointments online. This eliminates the need for queuing up outside a healthcare center, waiting for your turn, a common problem in India, where there is a shortage of medical infrastructure. If non-adherence is caused by anxiety or lack of patience, then this could help.

2. Self-submission of missing documents. These may be required for any further investigations, especially in the case of an ADR (adverse drug reaction). Providing an easy way for document submission and updating information could boost adherence and remove the fear or stigma of sharing information with others, another problem quite prevalent in India.

3. Calculate estimates for cost of care. The patient knows exactly how much he/she is spending on health and how to manage it better. A PSP provider could also be involved in managing the expenses and could provide funds for timely care through a PAP (patient assistance program), if money is a reason for non-adherence, as it for people who belong to socially and economically backward communities in India.

4. Provide personalized and accurate information. Hyper-personalization ensures that each patient gets help unique to his/her condition. Such personalization could greatly help improve adherence as it can equate to being empathetic too.

5. Request history of previous transactions like bills and queries made. This could help the patient understand better their medical condition or the drugs they are taking. Education can help tackle non-adherence, as the 2023 review conducted in India (mentioned earlier) also proved.

Words from AI Can Speak as Loud as Actions

Today AI has come such a long way that chatbots can have very human-like conversations with customers (patients in healthcare). AI and natural language processing (NLP) can help understand the caller’s intent and even gauge the sentiments.

It can also connect with the CRM to generate hyper-personalized recommendations based on this understanding and even route the call or chat to the most appropriate agent, depending on expertise levels. It can also gather valuable insights from call data over time, reducing call waiting time and improving caller satisfaction and issue resolution.

Telehealth Saves the Day and Days Ahead

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, remote consultation has been made possible, even in India, where the spread of the Internet and mobile communications is pretty good. A wide range of apps are available which make such video consultations possible. Such apps become a necessity in India, especially when lack of transportation, mobility or stigma become reasons for non-adherence. These consultations can prevent a rapid deterioration of health resulting from a refusal or hesitation to travel to the healthcare Centre.

Wearing Your Worries Where They Can Be Seen Helps

The global market size for wearable devices was valued at around US$26.8 billion in 2022. It is projected to grow at a CAGR of 25.7% from 2023 to 2030. These innovative devices include both simpler wearables such as smartwatches and other more complex devices such as biosensors located in different parts of the body.

These wearables can help scientists and healthcare providers track patient physical activity, heart rate, blood pressure, sleep quality, and more. Based on this data, people in healthcare can offer more targeted and immediate care. Apart from timely intervention in patient support programs, they also enable more accurate diagnoses even when done remotely. The fact that a patient is also aware of the various metrics affecting their health improves their openness to receive care and adherence too.?

Tech Is Not All You Need

A patient support program cannot be only run by technology. You need the human element in it to manage it well. Four key human skills cannot be replaced by technology:

1. Nurses can empathize and understand emotional needs. They can offer compassion and reassurance during trying times for patients, especially those with serious health conditions. This can establish trust on a level that technology alone can find difficult to achieve.

2. Effective communication is facilitated through Active Listening. Despite AI being able to even do sentiment analysis today, human agents can attentively listen to patients and decode nuances in their speech that AI still can’t do. This skill and call recordings allow for a deeper understanding of patient needs and enables the agent to respond with the right guidance.

3. Nurses encounter diverse patient scenarios bolstering adaptability. Nurses can quickly adjust the way they talk and act, based on cultural backgrounds, varying levels of health literacy, the demands of the case and patient preferences. This ensures that patients feel understood and valued even when their needs are very specific or special.

4. Technical glitches are resolved by a human only. Only a human being can step in to address challenges when the AI hallucinates, providing troubleshooting assistance and offering alternative solutions when the machine gives up. Their creativity and capability to think outside the box can also prove very valuable in such cases.

The Best of Both Worlds to Improve Medication Adherence

When patients are treated with empathy, they’re more likely to embrace the doctor’s recommendations and instructions. Tech is a great enabler in assessing, recording, communicating and treating patient conditions in a better way, whether they are mental or physiological. A combination of both leads to higher satisfaction levels.

And why is this important? Patient satisfaction and their online and offline reviews are a key component of the pharma company’s reputation. Is your patient support program technology-ready and does it meet the challenges you will face in India? If you need any assistance with your patient support program, a company like Alp Consulting with over a decade of experience in it, could be of great value in your journey to achieving better health outcomes and higher satisfaction among the patients you manage. Drop us a comment below and let us know if we can help.