Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Oct 15, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 23, 2018 - Dec 18, 2018
Date Accepted: May 11, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Mobile applications for increasing adherence: a systematic review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Between 20% and 50% of patients do not take their medication correctly, and this leads to increased morbidity and inefficacy of therapeutic approaches. Fostering treatment adherence is a priority objective for all health systems. The growth of mobile applications to facilitate therapeutic adherence has significantly grown in recent years. However, not all of them have evaluated the effectiveness for their purpose.
Objective:
To analyze whether mobile applications are perceived as useful for managing medication at home and if they actually contribute to increasing treatment adherence in patients.
Methods:
We carried out a systematic review of research published using the Scopus, Cochrane Library, Proquest and Medline databases and analyzed the information about their contribution to increasing therapeutic adherence and the perceived usefulness of mobile applications. This review examined studies published between 2000 and 2017.
Results:
Eleven studies fulfilled the inclusion criteria. Seven studies confirmed that the mobile application increased treatment adherence and in five of them the differences in adherence before and after the study were statistically significant. The users found mobile applications easy to use, useful for managing their medication. The patients were mostly satisfied with their use.
Conclusions:
The use of mobile applications helps increase treatment adherence and they are an appropriate method for managing medication at home.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.