The Future of Health Care? High-Tech is Revolutionizing Care at Practice and Home
Sarah Lueck
Originally published: Wall Street Journal June 26, 2006
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While this article focuses on the role of healthcare technology for the elderly in the future, the most interesting finding, vis-à-vis patient compliance, is this excerpt:
Commentary
The notion that patients might accept monitoring not only of disease symptoms but also of compliance with treatment if the proposition is framed appropriately is encouraging and intriguing, especially given the unreliability of patient self-report of adherence, for example, to a medication schedule. There is some evidence that such monitoring would improve compliance but even if it did not, providing the clinician with dependable adherence data would itself be invaluable. (See Cascading Costs Section of Noncompliance Costs and previous post, How To (Correctly) Not Take Medications As Prescribed )
Because the article provides no details of the research referenced in this excerpt, it begs the question of what proportion of the patient population would find such monitoring acceptable under which conditions. (Since we know that some patients attempt to sabatoge compliance monitoring, this is not a trival issue.) And other queries come to mind. Given that, in general, about half of patients comply with a given treatment plan, would positioning the monitoring to fit specific characteristics of patient groups increase the number of patients who find it acceptable? Further, do different segments of the patient populations respond positively to different conditions?
While these and similar issues must be addressed if widespread electronic monitoring is to be successful, the potential offered by electronic, passive reporting of compliance not only justifies that effort but also pursuing it now, even before the final formats of the technology are available for use by the general public.