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Medication adherence plays a major role in the control and management of chronic disease states such as diabetes and hypertension. Methods to improve medication adherence through medication education or increasing social support alone have not always shown to improve adherence rates, but have found to be contributing factors.1-3 As technology advances, mHealth has been increasingly explored as an avenue to combine efforts in communication, education, and support to patients to improve medication adherence and disease state control. This paper will begin with a review of the literature on mHealth programs targeted on improving medication education and adherence of diabetes and hypertension patients. The literature review was conducted on PubMed and identified seven studies for evaluation. Studies were evaluated for the mHealth program, implementation, and program outcomes. Following the literature review, this paper describes a program plan for diabetes and hypertension medication adherence program (INSTEP). INSTEP is a mHealth based program that will combines the use of medication education, improved medication communication strategies, and social support, to advance medication adherence and control of diabetes and hypertension. INSTEP will partner with the South African Department of Health, in addition to other key stakeholders, and launch an initial pilot program in Umlazi township primary health clinics. Program evaluation will be both quantitative and qualitative and both the training program for the primary health care clinics and patient program will be evaluation. Implementation evaluations and outcome evaluations will aim to provide data for quality improvement opportunities as the program continues to run. |
