What can patient health education coordinators learn from ten years of compliance research?

Research in compliance with medication prescriptions and life style changes that affect health status has yielded recommendations that, along with implications from recent theory development, need to be applied in the general practice of medicine and preventive medicine. For patients to benefit from the research it must be used by their care providers in a consistent way. To accomplish this means that the findings from past research need to be applied on an institutional basis. Hospitals, health maintenance organizations and health departments must incorporate these findings into their standards of care for their patients and clients to benefit. This paper reviews the previous articles in this special compliance collection and then discusses ways patient health education coordinators can apply them in their practice and influence their use by other practitioners.