• Korean Journal of Clinical Pharmacy
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.81-89
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• 2011

Medication adherence is an important public health issue. This study is conducted to explore non-adherence of elderly with hypertension and/or diabetes mellitus and to better understand its' influencing factors. To explore non-adherence, 605 elderly patients in community were surveyed with Modified Morisky Scale (MMS), from Aug 18 to Sept 19, 2008. MMS is designed to predict medication-taking behavior and outcomes, and also to explain persistence of the patient's long-term continuation of therapy, which is a significant factor in the long-term management of chronic diseases. Also, MMS is designed to classify patients into a high/low continuum for knowledge and motivation. Patients self reported medication adherence were average 4.66 with MMS (range 0-6), only 78% of patients hold high motivation of medication adherence although 95.5% of patients hold high knowledge of medication adherence. This study explores which factors influence to high motivation of medication adherence and it proved that patients' participation in work, education level, participation in private health insurance, number of medication and medication frequency per day, pharmacists' explanation, experience of non adherence due to cost are important factors to explain high motivation of medication adherence of elderly with hypertension and/or diabetes mellitus.

• YAKHAK HOEJI
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• v.57 no.5
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• pp.369-375
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• 2013

Objective: Using the Korean Health Panel data (KHP) of 2008 and 2009, this paper analyzed the effect of antihypertension medication adherence on the changes in medical service utilization and medical expenditure in the next year. Method: Through a face-to-face interview survey, KHP has provided an extensive data on demographic characteristics, medical utilizations behavior, medical expenditure and health behaviors of the targeted households and their members since 2008. KHP is recognized as highly accurate regarding medical expenditure in that it makes the target households to record 'Health diary' whenever they use healthcare service, which could minimize their cognitive bias or memory distortion. The 2010 KHP data was based on the interview from 6,432 households and 19,697 household members. Two part model was used to explore the effects of medication adherence on medical use (logistic regression analysis) and medical expenditures (OLS). Result: Our study result demonstrated that the 74.7% of the patients who strictly adhere to their medication in both years, in 2008 and in 2009, were likely to use inpatient service in 2010. This shows the noncompliant patients were in fact use emergency service less than the compliant patients. Conclusion: Based on our analysis, this paper concludes that the high medication adherence of hypertensive patients could contribute to reduce the emergency service use. Therefore it is highly recommendable for the Korean government and the insurer, NHIS, to actively invest in developing education and promotion program to improve medication adherence among hypertensive patients.