Cloud-Based Medication Non-adherence Assessment and Intervention System

Globally, non-adherence to prescribed medication has remained a common burden in healthcare especially among the outpatients with chronic diseases who are on long-time medications. This has caused worsening of health condition, increased healthcare cost, increased risk of disease progression and in some cases lead to patients early death. Thus, the need to assess the level of medication non-adherence in order to aid the development of patient-centric persuasive technology-based intervention for the improvement of medication adherence cannot be over-emphasized. Several systems on mhealth-based adherence intervention have been developed. However, these systems fail to recognize patient’s non-adherence level and lack the strategy for selecting and delivering appropriate personalized persuasive messages to individual patient based on the intervention need. This paper presents a developed cloud-based medication adherence assessment and intervention system capable of assessing individual patient level of medication non-adherence. Object-oriented analysis and design methodology with multitenant database architecture was adopted for the system development. With wide adoption and usability of mobile phone technologies in healthcare (mhealth), integration of programmable SMS and agent voice call APIs enhanced the system capability. The system features modules that can effectively be used to: assess individual patient’s level of non-adherence using Morisky Adherence Rating Scale (MARS), deliver persuasive adherence intervention messages, prescribe and view medications, book and view appointments, report drug reactions and many more.