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Computer-generated phone calls slightly increase asthma medication adherence
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Computer-generated phone calls based on a patient’s electronic health record and answers to questions led to a small but statistically significant increase in patients with asthma taking their medications, according to findings recently published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice.
“Leveraging technology such as phones, emails or texts — whether it be for medication adherence, blood pressure monitoring and glucose levels monitoring or other components of patient management — is rapidly becoming mainstream and is here to stay,” Peter J. Cvietusa, MD, of the department of asthma, allergy and immunology at Kaiser Permanente Colorado told Healio Family Medicine.
“We found that a speech recognition software program increased asthma medication adherence rates in children by 25% over baseline — so we wanted to see how utilizing the same program in adults with the same condition would do,” he added.
A computer-generated phone call based on the patient’s EHR was made to 4,510 adults aged 19 to 64 years. Based on the patient’s answers, their medication was refilled or a nurse called them back.
Researchers found patient adherence to medication increased from 39.5% in the year prior to the phone call to 41.7% the year after it (P < .0001). Courses of oral steroids decreased when an outlier month was removed from the pre- and post-intervention time periods. ED visits and hospitalizations were not frequent before or after the phone call and did not decrease over time.
Cvietusa acknowledged that implementing a program like the one in this study takes a financial investment. He offered some ways to offset the cost.
“Perhaps primary care practices and hospitals can team up and negotiate or bid on such software in bulk and then share it. The ‘people power’ behind building and maintaining such software could potentially be shared as well,” he said.
“Once the infrastructure is in place, adjusting the program to other diseases is easy and can be done at a relatively low cost. You might think using postage stamps to send out reminders are cheaper, but when you factor in all of your mailings, and look at the return on investment, adjusting the software is usually the more affordable option,” Cvietusa added. – by Janel Miller
Disclosures: The authors report no relevant financial disclosures.