Medication Adherence in Hypertension: A Cluster Randomized Clinical Trial

Medication nonadherence is present in nearly half of patients with hypertension but is underrecognized in clinical care. Data linkages between electronic health records and pharmacies have created opportunities for scalable assessment of medication adherence at the point of care.

To test the effectiveness of a multicomponent intervention that identified patients with uncontrolled hypertension and medication nonadherence using linked electronic health record-pharmacy data combined with team-based care to address adherence barriers.

TEAMLET (Leveraging Electronic Health Record Technology and Team Care to Address Medication Adherence) was a pragmatic, 2-arm, cluster randomized clinical trial conducted between October 2022 and November 2024 in 10 primary care sites in New York. The study included adults with uncontrolled hypertension and low medication adherence, defined as proportion of days covered (PDC) less than 80%. Data analysis was performed from November 2024 to January 2025.

The intervention consisted of the following: (1) automated identification of patients with medication nonadherence at the time of the visit; (2) prompting of medical assistants to screen for barriers to adherence; (3) clinical decision support alerting the primary care physicians and nurse practitioners to barriers to adherence; and (4) adherence discussion between the primary care physician or nurse practitioner and the patient. The comparator was usual care.

The primary outcome was change in PDC from baseline to 12 months.

Among 1726 patients (mean [SD] age, 67.2 [13.9] years; 887 [51.4%] female), the mean (SD) baseline PDC was 33.2% (30.5%) overall (32.4% [30.4%] in the intervention group and 34.0% [30.6%] in the control group). The mean (SD) PDC at 12 months was 51.1% (39.5%) for the intervention group and 53.1% (39.6%) for the control group. No difference was found in the change in PDC from baseline to 12 months between the intervention and control groups (mean [SD] absolute change in PDC, 18.5 [41.1] vs 18.2 [40.9] percentage points, respectively; adjusted difference, -0.15 percentage point; 95% CI, -4.06 to 3.76 percentage points). Change in systolic blood pressure and patients who became adherent (PDC ≥80%) at 12 months were also similar between groups.

In this pragmatic trial, an intervention that combined team-based primary care with automated identification of patients with antihypertensive medication nonadherence did not lead to improvements in adherence or blood pressure.

ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT05349422.