Addressing the Challenges of Non-Adherence

Today’s guest post comes from Magnar Kvilhaug, RPh, MBA and Kathleen Kvilhaug RPh, of Odin Pharmacy Innovations.

They describe AppaGrapha, a new free mobile app for improving patient adherence to drug therapy. This intriguing app allows patients to monitor their own therapy, provides feedback on adherence, confidentially shares data with a healthcare provider or pharmacist, and more. Details below. Android users can download the free AppaGrapha mobile app here. The iOS version will be available soon.

For more details about AppaGrapha, email Magnar Kvilhaug or Kathleen Kvilhaug. You can also visit them in booth #326 at the upcoming 2015 Armada Specialty Pharmacy Summit.

Addressing the Challenges of Non-Adherence
By Magnar Kvilhaug, RPh, MBA, and Kathleen Kvilhaug, RPh

As pharmacists and consultants, we believe that one of the greatest obstacles facing patients today is the ability to consistently take medication as prescribed, and successfully manage their health.

Currently available compliance solutions—offered through physician, pharmacy, and insurance providers—are channel biased and transactional in nature. They are often disjointed and lead to patient confusion. These solutions revolve around office visits, prescription refills, periodic phone calls, texts, or other activities.

These interventions are convenient for the providers, but frequently occur at times that are inconvenient for the patient. The problem with this approach is that it is isolated, labor intensive, and not patient centric. Despite these various efforts, patient non-adherence remains a $317 billion problem.

Making Patients a Part of the Solution

To address the challenges of patient non-adherence, we at Odin Pharmacy Innovations created AppaGrapha, a patient-centric, intuitive, user-friendly free mobile app. The app allows patients to actively document their adherence, reason for non-adherence, and sense of well-being.

AppaGrapha is designed to help patients successfully integrate their medication and health therapy with a busy life. The ultimate goal is to improve the patient’s health and quality of life via utilization of this app, along with existing Medication Therapy Management (MTM) activities.

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The AppaGrapha functionality allows for the initiation and persistence of dialogue across the continuum of care. The key interested parties include discharge planners, nurses, pharmacists, and physicians. With AppaGrapha, a practitioner or patient conveniently has the information needed to initiate a one-on-one conversation regarding treatment plans, medication adherence or barriers to success.

AppaGrapha engages and encourages patients to take a prominent role in being healthy and productive. Growing evidence supports that increased medication adherence decreases emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and unnecessary health care costs. (source)

Patients Need AppaGrapha

Patients are aware of health metrics such as BP (120/80), FBS (< 100), A1C (< 5.7), and can frequently recite their numbers. Ask a patient, “How are you at taking your medication?” The response is usually “pretty good,” despite the absence of a concrete method of measurement with which to accurately evaluate adherence.

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With AppaGrapha patients take an active role in becoming compliant with their treatments, understanding their progress, and reaching their therapeutic goals.

AppaGrapha by design is intuitive, friendly, and simple to use. Our experience as pharmacists interacting with patients guided us in designing the app to be flexible and discreet. AppaGrapha, a comprehensive app, incorporates five patient levels: reminder, feedback, context, summary, and related resources.

Reminder:

• Intuitive interface
• Accommodate complex dosing schedules
• Flexible scheduling of medication reminders
• Quick and easy-to-use drug selection and scheduling options
• Multiple snooze options—delay a reminder for 9 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour or 2 hours
• Successfully record when a medication dose is taken
• Track the reason for skipping a medication dose
• Document how you are feeling when taking a medication

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Feedback:

• Innovative analytics assist in improving medication adherence
• Graphs, charts, and trending scores provide immediate feedback
• Identify challenges through adherence assessments
• Confidentially share data with healthcare provider or pharmacist

Context:

• Comparison functionality provides context
• Compare against a community of unidentified patients taking the same medication
• Built-in motivational tool to beat the average and drive adherence upwards

Summary:

• Convenient summary functionality
• Summarize medications, allergies, and notes
• Generate an organized record of important information
• Send via email, text, or print a summary of treatment or dosing history
• Facilitate medication reconciliation or updates to health forms
• Quickly enter notes and save for future reference

Related Resources:

• Locate and view a variety of health centric and patient focused services
• Define a desired geographic radius
• Recommend resources that would benefit other patients
• Look for regularly updated resources based on user recommendations

As you can see, AppaGrapha is more than a simple medication reminder. It is a multi-functional tool designed to provide patients with solutions that can be shared with all members of their health care team.

AppaGrapha improves accuracy and efficiency of admissions processing, medication reconciliation, and discharge planning. It acts as a catalyst for dialogue between patient and clinician.

Android users can download the free AppaGrapha mobile app here. The iOS version will soon be available on iTunes. Click here if you would like us to email you when the iOS version becomes available.

We at Odin Pharmacy Innovations LLC have been working extensively in the specialty pharmacy space and across the spectrum of pharmacy channels. Please contact us to discuss opportunities to improve patient outcomes via AppaGrapha and our other designed offerings.

Developing solutions via innovative processes is what Odin does best. We look forward to helping you drive improvement and deliver results. We will be at the Armada Specialty Pharmacy Summit in May. Please visit us at booth #326.

Your journey to breakthrough discoveries starts with Odin. Let’s get to work.