When less is more: Can reduced health monitoring improve medication adherence?

Abstract

As the prevalence of chronic diseases rises, improving self-management has become an important determinant of the productivity of healthcare delivery. Recently, Mexico's largest healthcare provider began issuing automatic-refill prescriptions to stable hypertensive patients, thus reducing the frequency of health monitoring from 30- to 90-day intervals. Exploiting this change, I find that less monitoring implies no drawbacks in health outcomes and actually improves self-management of disease by increasing medication adherence when baseline monitoring is relatively frequent. The number of days when patients are out of medication between fillings falls by 2.2 days—an improvement in adherence of 6.4%. Furthermore, patients appear to value being on a low-frequency regime as they improve adherence in order to remain on it, suggesting that lower monitoring could be used as a “reward” to promote medication adherence or, potentially, other health behaviors. Finally, I find evidence of positive spillovers on adherence, as clinic congestion falls.