Healthcare provider targeted interventions to improve medication adherence: systematic review and meta-analysis

This systematic review applied meta-analytic procedures to synthesise medication adherence (also termed compliance) interventions that focus on healthcare providers.

Comprehensive searching located studies testing interventions that targeted healthcare providers and reported patient medication adherence behaviour outcomes. Search strategies included 13 computerised databases, hand searches of 57 journals, and both author and ancestry searches. Study sample, intervention characteristics, design and outcomes were reliably coded. Standardised mean difference effect sizes were calculated using random-effects models. Heterogeneity was examined with Q and I(2) statistics. Exploratory moderator analyses used meta-analytic analogue of ANOVA and regression.

Codable data were extracted from 218 reports of 151,182 subjects. The mean difference effect size was 0.233. Effect sizes for individual interventions varied from 0.088 to 0.301. Interventions were more effective when they included multiple strategies. Risk of bias assessment documented larger effect sizes in studies with larger samples, studies that used true control groups (as compared with attention control), and studies without intention-to-treat analyses.

Overall, this meta-analysis documented that interventions targeted to healthcare providers significantly improved patient medication adherence. The modest overall effect size suggests that interventions addressing multiple levels of influence on medication adherence may be necessary to achieve therapeutic outcomes.