New message: Take your medicine

Recent studies found that sending patients text message alerts reminding them to take their medication increased their chances of complying. A paper published in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at 16 studies which collectively tracked 3,000 chronically ill patients in different countries. The results were that patients went from a 50% compliance rate to a 68% compliance rate for taking their medications.

“Text-message based interventions can be delivered at low-cost, they can be easily scaled with computerized message management systems. So they are likely to be cost effective in healthcare,” says study co-author Clara Chow who directs the cardiovascular division of the George Institute for Global Health in Sydney, Australia.

Source: Kaiser Health News