Medication Adherence Clinical Decision Support

More than 50% of adults treated for diabetes, hypertension, or lipid disorders have suboptimal medication adherence, a prominent barrier to continued improvement in chronic disease care in the United States. Primary care providers (PCPs) often fail to identify medication nonadherence and/or have insufficient time and training to address underlying reasons for it. In this project, we propose a patient-centered and technology-driven strategy to identify patients with adherence issues and apply a team approach to help them achieve evidence-based personalized goals for glucose, blood pressure, or lipids. This intervention extends the use of a widely available clinical decision support (CDS) infrastructure to support a model of care that, for the first time outside of a fully integrated care environment, will integrate pharmacists within the primary care team. The intervention relies on a continuous health informatics loop to do the following: (a) identify high-risk patients with adherence problems at the point of care by expanding the capability of an electronic medical record (EMR)-linked CDS to identify poor adherence to medications; (b) establish and maintain an auto-populating up-to-date registry of patients identified for proactive pharmacist outreach; (c) implement a pharmacist outreach strategy based on an information-motivation-behavioral (IMB) framework recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) with demonstrated ability to influence adherence across a variety of clinical applications; and (d) coordinate care and adherence information by incorporating pharmacist assessment and action plans into CDS at subsequent office encounters.