Using a Tailored Health Information Technology Driven Intervention to Improve Health Literacy and Medication Adherence

Overview

Although most patients admitted with acute coronary syndrome or acute ischemic stroke in South Asian countries receive these evidence-based treatments, their overall continuation in the outpatient phase of care remains low. Patient from Pakistan are uniquely challenged in this respect because the overall literacy rates remain one of the lowest in Pakistan among South Asian Countries. In addition, a great majority of Pakistani patients often do not understand or follow health prescriptions (which are still written in English). Additionally, due to an unregulated health industry, they frequently take multiple opinions and prescriptions from different physicians. The investigators propose to develop a "talking prescription" for patients with stroke or myocardial infarction for secondary prevention. This will enable them to understand their medications better, improve health literacy and adherence. This is an IT enabled health literacy intervention. Physicians will prescribe statin and/or antiplatelet to the selected patients and enter the necessary details on an Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheet.Patients will be assigned to either of the 2 arms--either regular care or talking prescriptions. Follow-up will be done at 3 months post recruitment for behavioral knowledge assessment and adherence assessment.

Physicians seeing patients in the outpatient clinics will write patient's statin and/or antiplatelet prescription and the patient's cell phone numbers on an Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheet. The sheet will also have dosage, route, frequency and durations options for respective medications. The physician will color the appropriate specification for a medication instead of writing the prescription by hand. Statin medications include lovastatin, fluvastatin, simvastatin, atorvastatin, pravastatin, rosuvastatin or pitavastatin. Antiplatelet medications include aspirin, clopidogrel, aspirin plus dipyridamole, cilostazol and prasugrel. The unit receptionist would then scan the prescription sheet and upload the scanned copy to the database server. Software in the server will analyze the prescription and generate the following outputs for each medication: Output 1 (basic drug prescription information) (Option 1): Name of the medication, dosage, route, frequency, number of days, any special instruction, and Short Message Service (SMS) and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) code. Output 2 (detailed drug information): Indication (Option 2), Contraindications and side/adverse effects (Option 3), and Drug-drug interactions and drug-food interactions (Option 4). SMS software would then send a voice and text message to the patient's cell phone with Output 1. The voice message will be in Urdu. The prescription would be read to the patient through voice message in Urdu. The text message with Output 1 would be sent in Roman Urdu. Output 1 will also generate a unique code for each patient. The patient will use this code, at any time of his/her convenience, to request for a repeated text or voice message for output 1 or to request for a repeated text or voice message for Output 2 (if the patient is interested in receiving detailed drug information). The patient would be able to receive both the outputs multiple times, on-demand. Patient will also receive a weekly text message reminding them to take their statin and/or antiplatelet medication.