Reminders for medication adherence: a review and research agenda

Abstract

Reminders are very promising interventions for improving medication adherence as shown in numerous studies. However, there are several challenges including different effectiveness for patients, duration, diseases and complexity of regimen. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review of published literature using multiple databases to address above challenges. The systematic review resulted in identifying 77 papers. After classifying and analysing individual papers, we find that: 1) reminders are effective when patients are busy or have cognitive impairment; 2) there is short-term improvement in MA with reminders; 3) patients lose interest in reminders with time, especially if the message is static or monotonous; 4) medication adherence will not improve if reminders do not address the underlying reasons behind low adherence; and 5) reminders are more suitable for unintentional non-adherence than intentional non-adherence. More research can be done to study and evaluate the effectiveness of reminders over long-term, especially using personalisation and context-awareness. The findings can serve as a resource for healthcare professionals and researchers in deciding when and where to use reminders, for how long and how to improve the effectiveness of reminders.