Bibliographic Analysis of Medication Adherence and Use of Reminders

Introduction

The fluid nature of medication-taking behaviour has been a subject of study for many years. Scientists, researchers and scholars have tried to solve the problem of medication non-adherence but have failed to reach a consensus. What kinds of reminders are effective for various diseases and varied patient types? and what is the improvement in adherence rate sustained over time? (Singh & Varshney, 2019a) remains a baffling question to the researchers. Medication non-adherence is a significant impediment to attaining optimum results in chronic illness (Saha et al., 2021b). Adherence to medication therapy is a dynamic process. There are various stages like initiation, maintenance, and discontinuation. The process is influenced by numerous factors like the type of disease, patient, regime, treatment, health care system, socioeconomics etc. (Brown & Bussell, 2011). Non-adherence to the prescribed medication is caused due to several factors: patients’ beliefs, poor communication from service providers, depression, medication dose frequency etc. (Saha et al., 2021a). It has been postulated that support and continuous behavioural intervention are essential to have adherence over some time. A network meta-analysis study conducted by Wiecek et al. (2019) identified multicomponent interventions like rewards, attitude, education and technology to improve adherence over some time. According to the authors, attitude dealt with a change of behavioural purpose constructed on the “Theory of Planned Behaviour”. Education dealt with information shared by healthcare professionals. Technology dealt with systems/instruments/interventions that helped take the medication, and it worked best in an association of reward with it.

The large number of studies conducted on medication adherence and means to increase adherence indicate the importance of this problem. There is a lack of literature based on the bibliographic analysis of medication adherence and reminders used to improve adherence. This study tries to highlight the work done by different researchers and the publication platforms (journals) in disseminating the knowledge to the readers at large. This study attempts to encompass the trend of publication, the prominent contributors, funders, countries and shift in the direction of reminders used, based on bibliographic and text analysis.