A Framework for Assessing Adherence and Persistence to Long-Term Medication

Poor adherence and persistence to long-term medication is a growing concern worldwide. Despite their importance, tools that facilitate the identification of patients who show poor adherence and persistence rates are limited. Herein we present a framework we have developed to assist in assessing adherence and persistence rates. We demonstrate the framework's features using production electronic medical record data from a general medical practice in the context of analysis of antihypertensive and antidepressant prescribing. The framework is flexible and extensible and has the potential to be used as a tool to improve the management of patients on long-term medication either to benchmark quality over a specified evaluation period or for the direct identification of specific patients that would benefit from immediate follow-up.