Pharmacists can significantly improve patient compliance in 2 minutes, study finds

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Pharmacists who employ an unconventional, interactive patient counseling technique can more than double the chance that people will understand key issues on how to take, understand and manage their use of prescription drugs, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association. 

 

The Oregon State University study provides compelling evidence that this technique could significantly improve the understanding of drug use and storage, possible side effects, what to expect from a medication and what to do if something isn’t working.

 

“This approach to prescription drug counseling has now been shown to be a dramatic improvement over conventional methods,” stated Robert Boyce, director of pharmacy services in the Student Health Center Pharmacy at Oregon State University, and corresponding author on the study. “This is the first real analysis to prove that it works, and that the approach could be extremely important for health care in America.”

 

Historically, pharmacists who provided patients with information about their prescription medications – when that was done at all – most often used what was called a “lecture format,” essentially a one-way form of communication that was often referred to as reading off the label. The efficacy of this system varied widely, and gave little assurance that patients had heard and understood a range of details about the drug they were preparing to take.

 

By contrast, Boyce co-developed an alternative approach during a 21-year career with the Public Health Service pharmacy program of the Indian Health Service, a federal health program for American Indians and Alaskan natives. It emphasizes a questioning of patients on their understanding of the drug they have been prescribed, and answers questions about whatever they don’t understand.  It’s a discussion, not a presentation.

 

The concept, Boyce said, which was released in 1991 to schools and colleges of pharmacy, is now gaining much wider acceptance across the nation. This study, which included a survey of 500 participants at four community pharmacies in Oregon, is the first of its type to confirm the value of the new approach. A lead author was Naomi Lam, a pharmacy resident at the OSU Student Health Center Pharmacy at the time of the research.

 

In this approach, patients are asked three basic, open-ended questions, relating to the name and purpose of the medication; how to use and store it; and what possible side effects there might be, and what to do if they occur.

 

The new study found that 71% of patients using the new counseling approach could answer all three questions correctly, compared to 33% of patients who were instructed with the conventional system.

 

With either approach, most people understood what medication they were taking and what it was for. However, with the new system, four times as many people understood how and when to take their medication, and also could answer basic questions about adverse effects.

 

According to this study, the average time it took pharmacists to use the new counseling system was a little over two minutes, compared to 75 seconds for conventional counseling.

 

“For a busy pharmacist, some might suggest this is a significant additional amount of time,” Boyce said. “But when you compare that to the risks of something not going right when a patient does not understand what the specific directions are, or what to expect from their medication, the additional effort seems minimal.”