
Patient compliance and artificial intelligence
Compliance, adherence to treatment - the degree of correspondence between the patient’s behavior and the recommendations received from the doctor. In Russia, treatment adherence rates remain lower than in developed countries. According to IQVIA - Russia, only 60% of patients fully adhere to the prescribed therapy and doctor’s recommendations for taking course medications. At the same time, the more serious the disease, the higher the treatment adherence rates. How can artificial intelligence improve these metrics?
First of all, it is worth noting that low adherence to treatment is due to three main factors:
- General distrust of “chemical” drugs, high costs associated with drugs.
- Problems with the availability of drugs that are trusted by both the doctor and the patient.
- Low pharmaceutical literacy and awareness of patients in the country as a whole.
At the same time, artificial intelligence and other modern technologies are already helping to increase the compliance rate, at least at the “micro level”. Thus, many clinics already offer patients the use of fairly simple applications in which the doctor enters prescriptions indicating the frequency of drug intake and the duration of treatment. The application, in turn, sends a notification to the patient every time a drug is needed, which helps to increase treatment adherence.
In a global sense, solutions are emerging on the IT market that allow to combine the efforts of pharmaceutical manufacturers, health care institutions (HCIs) and specific patients. A tool in this case can be geomarketing technologies. The website of the Marketing logic company provides information about the case of using the Atlas GIS system, which allows optimizing the business processes of a pharmaceutical company and increasing compliance indicators.
The system works as follows: “Using the analysis of dozens of impersonal parameters (socio-demographic data, traffic, transport routes, location of healthcare facilities, their profiles and scale), the solution analyzes demand and keeps targeted records of patient needs for the rapid delivery of medicines in the required quantities to pharmacies and pharmacy chains, reducing patient waiting time for the drug. The implemented solution also reduces drug inventories in pharmacy chains and reduces financial and time costs for all participants in the supply chain in the pharmaceutical market.”