A simple automated telephone call may be enough to convince people to take their medicine, a study by Kaiser Permanente has found.
As part of the study, an automated telephone call was made to patients on cholesterol-reducing drugs who hadn’t picked up their medicine two weeks after it was prescribed. A letter was sent a week later if patients still hadn’t filled their prescriptions.
The calls and letters informed people about the importance of taking the medication and encouraged them to have prescription filled or to call their doctor.
The outreach resulted in a 16 percent decrease in people who did not get their prescriptions filled after 25 days, the study found.
When people take their medication it helps control health problems and saves money on hospitalizations and complications from disease, the Kaiser researchers said.
