Using new technologies for improving psychotropic medication adherence

• Main Authors: Giorgos Iniatis, Giorgos Georgiou, Angelos P Kassianos, Silouanos Nicolaou, Electra Papaconstantinou
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2015-10-01
• Series: Frontiers in Public Health
• Subjects: Compliance; Medication Adherence; Pharmacy; Psychotropic Drugs; Health Psychology; New technologies; mHealth; mobile application development; Smartphone application; Doctor-patient communication
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/conf.FPUBH.2016.01.00114/full

Background: Approximately one out of two patients do not take their medication three months after therapy starts; while in patients with mental disorders this number varies. The WHO published a guide for clinicians, advising them to develop strategies for improving medication adherence. Aims: The aim of this project is to develop a smartphone application that will help patients adhere to their psychotropic medication and clinicians to keep track of their patients’ adherence. Methods: In Phase I we will design an application based on scientific evidence and employ software and psychological (i.e. cognitive behavioural therapy) techniques to inform the applications’ features. In Phase II we will use patient and clinical focus groups to validate in the process the applications’ usability and effectiveness. Results: We expect to develop a framework to assess the feasibility and usability of the application’s features. We also expect to have a first version of the application, which will be used in further studies using evaluation methodologies to update its content. Project is in the early stages of development. Conclusions: Implementing such an app will lead to an effective and possibly low cost method for improving psychotropic medication adherence with significant benefits for both patients and clinicians. The applications’ integration with usual care will lead to social Benefits like higher quality of care, clinical effectiveness, reduced healthcare costs and time consumption, advantages of online possibilities and better patient outcomes like quality of life and patient satisfaction with care provision. Supplementary Material: Technological aspects of the application • The user will be able to organise their medication schedule (patient user) or monitor patients’ adherence (clinician user) using their smartphone or computer. • In order to store and access information that are related to several drugs or medicines a Database Management System (DBMS) will be required. • To ensure that users have the latest information regarding existing drugs on their device, the application will access the remote database in regular time intervals to check if data stored in the user’s device have changed (or deleted) from the remote database. • Our implementation will support the communication between different smart-phone devices (client-server model). • Our implementation will be highly secure in order to protect data privacy of its users.