External Support for Collaborative Medication Planning by Patients and Providers

Abstract

Older adults' medication nonadherence is an important patient safety issue. Adherence depends on plans that instantiate treatment guidelines in the context of patients' daily lives, but the ability to create successful plans is often undercut by poor collaboration between providers and patients. We investigated whether external aids can support the provider/patient collaboration needed to create effective plans for taking multiple medications. We tested whether an external aid that was designed to reduce cognitive load associated with collaborative problem solving (“medtable”) was more effective than an unstructured aid (blank paper) in a simulated patient/provider collaboration task. Findings suggested that pairs of older adults worked together more efficiently to create accurate schedules when using the medtable.