JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

This applied research project aims to evaluate an interactive digital patient/primary care professional platform designed specifically to improve medication adherence, an important issue in efficient healthcare. It is estimated that more than 1.3 million Quebecers do not adhere to their treatment as prescribed. By ensuring better treatment efficacy and chronic disease control, improved adherence has the potential to provide several benefits such as reduced co-morbidities, reduced costs associated with hospitalizations, reduced absenteeism from work, and optimization of health care services in general. Recognizing the health issues associated with non-adherence to treatment, MedHelper has developed a digital platform offering a patient-healthcare professional interaction model that stands out in the way it seamlessly links the development, sharing and monitoring of a care plan. Two interfaces (web and mobile) operating synchronously provide an engaging experience as well as the necessary functionality to maximize patient adherence. The platform allows for patient/healthcare professional exchanges to facilitate the timing of medication or chronic disease management.

Objective:

The general objective of this project is to analyze the use process and document the effects of the interactive patient/professional platform in a real clinical use situation.

Methods:

The project will follow a creative Design Thinking process and a continuous quality improvement approach, all in an "agile" development mode based on the needs expressed by the users (patients and health professionals). A mixed-method evaluation research design will be used. Qualitative data will be used to assess the user experience while quantitative data analysis will provide the necessary insight to document the optimal use of the platform. The focus will be on treatment adherence for chronic diseases (e.g. diabetes, COPD, depression and anxiety) for increased use of the digital platform.

Results:

The results of this project will be relevant to clinicians and managers seeking contemporary solutions to support patient adherence to treatment. These results will enable optimal use of the platform and identify areas for improvement in the use of interactive patient-healthcare professional applications.

Conclusions:

The adoption of a patient/healthcare professional interactive digital platform that is effective in improving adherence to treatment represents significant medium- to long-term macroeconomic benefits from an overall reduction in health costs. The anticipated health and economic benefits of the platform are transferable to other sectors of the network that also work with care plans, such as medical specialists, social workers, nutritionists, physical therapists and occupational therapists. It will be interesting to evaluate the extent of the impact across the different care sectors in other projects involving the scaling of the interactive digital platform.