30 May 2007, NetworkPharma Ltd, Oxford, UK have published another in their new KeywordPharma series of Expert Reviews intended for individuals working in and around the global pharmaceutical industry.
Patient Compliance and the Need for Technologies is now available for purchase. Dr Faiz Kermani draws on extensive references to explain the background to patient compliance issues and to set the scene for an exploration of how technology can be harnessed to improve this significant but widely under-acknowledged challenge.
Patient compliance is a widely used but often ill-defined term. It is also a significant challenge for the global healthcare market and all of its major stakeholders, with serious economic and societal implications. In the USA alone it is estimated that patient noncompliance costs the economy around US$100 billion annually, including US$8 billion in lost pharmacy revenues. Beyond this, patient non-compliance is proving to be a persistent thorn in the side of a growing global focus on improving health outcomes.
The ramifications for the pharmaceutical industry are huge. Many companies are seeking to develop alternative dosing and formulation strategies to tackle the problem. Studies have shown that once-daily and twice-daily treatments are most commonly associated with good compliance, while injectable medicines are considered the most respected among many patients.
But pharma companies appear very slow to adopt and embrace new interactive technologies to tackle compliance, despite growing evidence that they can help improve performance. Standard communications technologies such as email and SMS (Short Message Service) can now be deployed to deliver timely reminders to patients in routine care settings to take their medicines. But industry uptake is sluggish, perhaps because the escalating costs of traditional drug development are such that the sector appears cautious to invest further in another aspect of the R&D process, uncertain of the value it may provide.
Greater work, therefore, needs to be done to highlight the true value of new technologies in compliance programmes within pharma. But before that battle can be won, a thorough understanding of patient non-compliance and the factors that are central to it is essential. This Expert Review, Patient Compliance and the Need for Technologies, explains the background to patient compliance issues and sets the scene for an exploration of how technology can be harnessed to improve this significant but widely under-acknowledged challenge.
The author, Dr Faiz Kermani, said: "The issue of non-compliance is not a new one and has been investigated for many decades worldwide. However, since non-compliance reduces the quality of healthcare and can lead to dangerous consequences for patients, there is currently a renewed emphasis on the problem."
All KeywordPharma publications can be purchased from ThePharmYard at www.ThePharmYard.com
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About the author
Dr Faiz Kermani has 15 years' experience in both academia and the pharmaceutical industry. He has worked in pharmaceutical R&D, pricing and reimbursement, marketing and medical education. Dr Kermani holds a PhD in Immunopharmacology from St. Thomas' Hospital, London, and a First Class Honours degree in Pharmacology with Toxicology from King's College, London. He has written extensively on international healthcare issues, and is on the editorial board of a number of publications, including Contract Services Europe (Advanstar Communications, UK), Contract Pharma (Rodman Publishing, USA) and Medical Science Liaison (MSL) Quarterly (MSL Institute LLC, USA). In March 2006, he was a delegate on the UK Government's Trade and Investment Biotech Scoping Mission to China and contributed to the subsequent report. Dr Kermani is co-editor of the multiauthor book Patient Compliance: Sweetening the Pill (Gower Publishing, 2006), much of which forms the baseline for this expert review.
Written by pharmaceutical industry specialists, KeywordPharma publications are designed to be authoritative, relevant, succinct and helpful to pharmaceutical industry executives in their day-to-day work and in their longer term career development. Available to purchase individually as e-documents, they build into a specialist knowledge library for everyone working in and around the global pharmaceutical industry.
Developed and managed by NetworkPharma Ltd, ThePharmYard provides instant access to a unique database of specialist information which is particularly relevant to individuals working within the medical and pharmaceutical industries around the world. Titles from a diverse range of independent publishers are available to purchase in electronic document format for immediate access.
NetworkPharma Ltd is an independent, specialist company founded by Peter Llewellyn, to focus on novel approaches to disseminating information within the global medical and pharmaceutical industries. Peter Llewellyn previously founded and built the leading industry portal site, InPharm, which was subsequently purchased by John Wiley & Sons to manage alongside their other industry services, PharmaFile and Pharmafocus.
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