Taking an Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding and Improving Medication Adherence

Excerpt

The World Health Organization defines adherence as “the extent to which a person’s behavior—taking medication, following a diet, and/or executing lifestyle changes—corresponds with agreed recommendations from a health care provider.” While adherence research has focused primarily upon multiple dimensions related to taking medications in a manner congruent with prescriber recommendations, other aspects of the broader definition of adherence, including utilization of medical care and engagement in self-care behaviors, have received increasing attention in recent years. Moreover, with greater emphasis on patient-centered care and shared decision making between consumers of care and their health care provider(s), the pejorative term compliance has fallen out of favor and has been replaced nearly universally with the term adherence. Also, although adherence has traditionally focused upon medications used to manage long-term, chronic conditions (e.g., hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, rheumatic conditions), analogous principles are germane and have been applied to curable medical conditions (e.g., cancer, tuberculosis, hepatitis C virus infection). …