Adherence and events reported by patients: The value for Hospital Pharmacy

by Ana Díaz-Roncero, October 5, 2022

For several years now, hospital pharmacy services have had to adapt themselves to the circumstances of COVID-19, boosting telepharmacy which, among other outcomes, has enabled the pharmacies to collect data reported by patients for a variety of purposes. These Patient-Reported Outcomes (PROs) provided various advantages for the pharmacy services during the most difficult times of the pandemic, creating a new scenario, in which their use and application offered promising results even beyond those originally envisaged.

The hospital pharmacist, as a health professional specialized in medication, has the responsibility to watch for proper therapeutic compliance and to monitor the safety of the treatment. In this context, using PROs for information on therapeutic adherence, adverse events, quality of life, or physical and psychological aspects related to the patient’s disease, becomes a high-value resource for carrying out those activities. The most obvious result is that those data can help the pharmacists in research projects promoted by them, in addition to the monitoring and management of patients in hospital pharmacy consultations, with the end result of improving the efficiency and safety of the pharmacological treatments.

In fact, as indicated in the document “Adherence, new paradigm in the pharmacist-patient relationship” (in Spanish), promoting adherence can be more beneficial to health than the improvement of a specific pharmacological treatment. Understanding the degree of the patient’s therapeutic compliance in real time enables intervention at the appropriate time, resulting in better progress for the patient and assuring the sustainability of the healthcare system.

In addition, pharmacists’ management of events associated with the use of the pharmaceutical can help to reduce those events. Various studies show that some four to nineteen percent of hospital admissions are due to adverse events, and it is estimated that between twenty-five and sixty percent of those could be prevented. Therefore, the fact that the hospital pharmacist can rely on data provided directly by the patients enables him or her to understand the problems related to the medications at the time they appear, facilitating prevention, detection, and resolution of those problems, and thus encouraging the appropriate use of the medication.

Persei vivarium uses Caaring®, our digital platform aimed at improving patient monitoring and generating real-life evidence. Through the platform, the patients can report their own data about events, adherence, and symptoms, sharing this information with the hospital pharmacist, facilitating follow-up and management of the healthcare process, and improving decision-making.

Ultimately, using data reported by patients through technology, especially regarding adherence and events, benefits the work of the hospital pharmacist. This information enables him or her to optimize the healthcare process; prevent, evaluate, and intervene in cases where there is a medication-related problem; and assure therapeutic compliance. All this results in an improvement in the patients’ health and quality of life.

#HospitalPharmacy #PatientReportedOutcomes #PROMs