Patient Compliance with Medications: Issues and Opportunities By Jack Fincham Pharmaceutical Press $32.95

Book offers medication compliance strategies

Half of all patients don’t take their medications as directed, putting their health at risk and potentially driving up the cost of their health care.

In Patient Compliance with Medications: Issues and Opportunities, Jack Fincham, A.W. Jowdy Professor of Pharmacy Care in the College of Pharmacy, offers physicians, pharmacists and other health care professionals a look at why many patients don’t take their medicine as directed. The book also provides simple strategies that can help improve patient compliance.

In the 232-page book, Fincham explores how drug cost, treatment regimen and other factors affect compliance; the costs and consequences of noncompliance; how health care professionals can improve compliance among patients; and how the British emphasis on concordance, which focuses on shared decision making between the patient and health care providers, can influence compliance.

The aging population and the increased reliance on drugs to treat and manage conditions make compliance a critically important issue. In many cases, patient noncompliance can drive up the cost of health care by necessitating more expensive treatments later on.