According to a recent study of patients with hypertension, the answer is yes.
The study by Kronish et al. (2016) used a cluster randomized trial design made up of 24 providers and 100 patients. Half of the providers were randomized to receive received a report summarizing electronically measured patient adherence to their blood pressure regimen as well as and recommended clinical to address potential non-adherence and non-response issues. The other half of providers just treated patients as they normally would (i.e., usual care) as they did not receive any report.
How did access to the adherence report affect provider decisionmaking?
The proportion of visits with appropriate clinical management was higher in the intervention group than the control group (45 out of 65; 69 %) versus (12 out of 35; 34 %; p = 0.001). A higher proportion of adherent patients in the intervention group had their regimen intensified (p = 0.01), and a higher proportion of nonadherent patients in the intervention group received adherence counseling (p = 0.005). Patients in the intervention group were more likely to give their clinician high ratings on quality of care (p = 0.05), and on measures of patient-centered (p = 0.001) and collaborative communication (p=0.02).
Although one should be cautious of the external validity of extrapolating these results to other clinical settings, as more and more adherence data becomes available to physicians due to information collected from wearables, digital medicine and other sources, this study says that physicians will take this information into account when making treatment recommendations.
Source:
- Kronish, Ian M., Nathalie Moise, Thomas McGinn, Yan Quan, William Chaplin, Benjamin D. Gallagher, and Karina W. Davidson. “An Electronic Adherence Measurement Intervention to Reduce Clinical Inertia in the Treatment of Uncontrolled Hypertension: The MATCH Cluster Randomized Clinical Trial.” Journal of general internal medicine (2016): 1-7.
It is a travesty that this kind of so called research is going to be used incresingly to force physicians into being healcare cops and patients into little more than children who need supervision. When pateints feel they are under surveillance, and being judged and punshed by their doctors, trust evaporates and the doctor patient relationship is dead. Unfortunately, this seems to be the goal of the policy makers.