Evaluating Reminders for Medication Adherence and Side Effects in M-Health Environment

Reminders are a very promising intervention for improving medication adherence in mobile health environment. From the published literature, this research find that effectiveness of reminders varies widely and side effects of reminders have not been studied. To address these, this article develops an analytical model to evaluate different types of reminders for medication adherence. The model is also used to estimate side effects of the reminders. The results indicate that context-aware reminders perform better than simple reminders in improving medication adherence for willing patients in mobile health environment. Simple and persistent reminders also lead to more side effects than context-aware reminders. The results of this study will be useful for patients, healthcare providers, researchers and policy makers in improved decision making for medication adherence. The future work can include development of smart reminders to meet different requirements of patients, healthcare professionals and payers in terms of personalization, performance, long-term effectiveness, reliability, and health outcomes.