Unfortunately, people are not very good at taking pills over long periods, even when their lives are at stake. CTA is dedicated to improving people’s health by solving medication adherence problems.

Medication adherence (compliance) is defined as the extent to which patients take medications as prescribed (# times per day for a period of time) by their healthcare providers. Because it impedes the healing potential of virtually all modern medical advances, non-adherent patient behavior may be the single most important challenge faced by healthcare practitioners today. Patient non-adherence has been called by medical industry experts as “the Achilles heel of modern health care.”

According to the August 2005 “Medication Adherence” study reviewed in the New England Journal of Medicine:

• The most common barriers to adherence is forgetfulness (30%), followed by other priorities (16%), deliberate decision (11%), emotional factors (7%) and (27%) gave no reason.
• Average adherence rates for patients participating in clinical trials are generally higher because of the additional attention patients receive and the scrutiny of selection criteria. However, even in clinical trials, adherence rates range from only 43% to 78% among patients receiving treatment for chronic conditions, despite the fact that the consequences of non-adherence are typically more severe.
• Adherence rates are generally higher among patients with acute conditions as compared to those with chronic conditions. The worst cases of non-adherence are for preventive regimens or patients who are asymptomatic. Persistence among patients with chronic conditions is disappointingly low, dropping most dramatically after six months of therapy.

According to the 2005 market research study, “Pharmaceutical Patient Compliance and Disease Management – The Cost of Noncompliance”' by Cutting Edge Information:

• Up to 85% of patients do not refill prescriptions and complete their treatment regimens.
• 10% to 20% of initial prescriptions go unfilled
• Up to 20% of all hospital and nursing home admissions and 125,000 deaths annually are attributed to non-compliance
• The pharmaceutical industry loses nearly $8 billion in revenue each year based upon patients never filling or refilling their prescriptions.

Further supporting problem, according to the 2000 article “Medication Non-adherence: Finding Solutions to a Costly Medical Problem,” in Drug Benefit Trends:

• 50% of the patients for whom appropriate medication is prescribed fail to receive the full benefits because of inadequate adherence to treatment.
• 20% to 80% of patients make errors in taking medication and that 20% to 60% stop taking medications before being instructed to do so.
• The worst compliers were patients younger than 55 years and those older than 80 years, as the best compliers were approximately 70 years old.