[This entry is a continuation of yesterday's post, Running Patient Compliance Up The Flagpole ]

It seems to me that, for example, a results-oriented marketing specialist assigned to create an advertising campaign for the Patient Compliance Trade Group might have some useful insights about naming, with apologies to Prince, the entity formerly known as patient compliance.

Such a professional might well point out that, if we consider the name a tool of persuasion, then choosing one from a batch of proven losers isn’t a promising prescription for success, and then to on to suggest …

Changing The Rules Of The (Name) Game

Perhaps the efforts consumed in the compliance/adherence/concordance ruckus are misplaced, and we need take a different tack.

While our conjured up copywriter would certainly care about compliance, she would see that as the means - and only one element of the means, at that - not the goal. Pausing for effect, she might then declare, quietly but authoritatively,

The brainstorming session that followed would probably begin with constructions analogous to Age-defying, perhaps something on the lines of Treatment Failure Resistant.

While that is not a particularly felicitous turn of phrase, I can certainly envision being more comfortable telling a patient that we’re going to focus on tactics to make him Treatment Failure Resistant rather than the same tactics making him more compliant or more adherent. No doubt a real rather than imagined ad agency creative team could come up with a pithy, patient-validating, clinically accurate term.

Conclusion

Vanquishing fantasized ad agencies from the discussion, my point is that if we’re going to fuss over nomenclature – and it seems that we are – we should at least be fussing over the primary rather than secondary issue; i.e., over implementing treatment rather than the calculation of the degree to which a patient follows directions.

Footnotes

1. OK, if she used precisely those words, we might have to hypothesize that our conjured up copywriter has read the Healthcare Alignment page of this web site, but still … [back]

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