The Application Of Big Data Analysis To Measure And Better Understand Medication Adherence: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Medication Adherence (approximately 50% in developed countries) is widely recognized as a worldwide issue in public health leading with, among others, poor healthcare outcomes, poor quality of life and increasing cost for the National Health System. So far, many studies have investigated how to measure adherence, how to overcome barriers and how to solve them. The improvement on Information Technologies and Big Data analysis can be integrated in tools and support practices to measure medication adherence. The objective of this paper is to explore and map the recent literature that used Big Data as a tool or framework to measure and increase knowledge about medication non-adherence. The study presents a systematic literature review using papers published between 01/01/2003 and 01/01/2017 on PubMed, ScienceDirect and Scopus about methods applied to measure medication adherence using Big Data strategy. A total of 192 potential relevant publications was identified. After the screening process, 22 articles used and on three main Big Data Healthcare categories: Omics (1): Metabolomics (1), Medical Specialties (7): Endocrinology (3), Cardiology (2), Respiratory diseases (1), Neurology (1), Public Health (14): Bioinformatics (11), Electronic health Records (3). Adherence measurement methods classified in, Self Reported methods (4): interviews (2), questionaries’ (2). Indirect methods (10): administrative data (4), electronic monitoring (5), Pill count (1). Direct methods (3): Sensor/biological marker (1), telemedicine (2). Most of the studies use retrospective datasets like EHR, administrative data, or questionnaires (12), three studies apply real-time analysis and three studies develop data integration processes. A limited number of publications considered clearly the relationship between adherence and Big Data, using common definition, determinants or measurement methods. This lack of common approach how the medication adherence issues and highlight the necessity of setting up a common framework to improve the research about medication adherence.