Adheris conducts a variety of research programs systematically designed to study adherence to prescribed therapy. These research projects shed light on factors influencing medication adherence. They also help Adheris to develop and implement more targeted and customized educational programs to improve medication adherence.

     Adheris collaborates on research projects with leading researchers in the area of adherence.

     The Adheris Scientific Advisory Board provides input to all research programs based on the members' expertise in medical/health research and clinical practice. The research findings are published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at medical conferences.

     Click here  to view recent publications.

    The goal of Adheris' programs is to improve patients’ medication adherence, which is defined as the degree to which a patient’s behavior in terms of taking medication coincides with medical advice. Two dimensions of drug adherence are compliance and persistence. Medication compliance is the extent to which a patient acts in accordance with the prescribed interval and dose of a treatment regimen. Medication persistence is the accumulation of time from initiation to discontinuation of therapy.

    The Adheris methodology to assess program results is unique in that all programs are designed and conducted as prospective randomized trials with one or more intervention (protocol) groups and a control group. After the first prescription fill, each patient is randomly assigned at a pre-determined ratio to either one of the intervention groups or the control group. Such random assignment assures comparability of the treatment and control groups with respect to the baseline demographics and clinical characteristics.

    Different metrics of compliance and persistence are used to quantify the effect of each intervention. These outcomes include:

• Time to discontinuation
• Total days supply
• Total units dispensed
• Total number of fills
• Time to dose creep
• Time to brand or class switch
• Single refill noncompliance
• Prescription completion
• Time to next Rx first fill

    Measures of interest also include many baseline demographic and clinical characteristics of the study population, such as age, gender, geographic region, socioeconomic variables, dosing level for the index therapy, co-payment amount, pre-index length of therapy, pre-index comorbidities, and pre-index chronic disease score (CDS).

    Multivariate modeling techniques are used to control for possible confounding factors and improve precision of estimates. Such models include proportional hazard regression for the time to event outcomes (e.g. discontinuation, dose creep, brand or class switch, next Rx first fill), generalized linear models (GLM) with Poisson or negative binomial distributions for count data (e.g. total days supply, total units dispensed, total number of fills), and logistic regression for prescription completion and single refill noncompliance analyses. Also, various smoothing and modeling techniques are used to assess compliance and persistence trends over time.