Medication Adherence

Project Leader:

Tonya Fancher

Co-investigators:

Ladson Hinton, Anthony Jerant, and Debora Paterniti

Project Coordinator: Khai Nguyen

Major advances have occurred in medication treatment for mental health disorders. However, the odds of a good outcome if the patient is adherent are almost three times higher than the odds of a good outcome if the patient is non-adherent. Non-adherence occurs for a variety of reasons, and many of these can be linked to sociocultural variables such as the lack of help and support from family members and peers, the patients’ identity and self-image, as well as the meaning of the medication. Dr. Tonya Fancher directs the Medication Adherence Research Program that tests the effectiveness of a family-based approach to improving medication adherence among Southeast Asian patients. The underlying assumption of the approach is that family matters very much for adherence in Southeast Asian psychiatric outpatients and that key decision-makers within the family are often unavailable to clinicians, compromising attempts to improve compliance. The research is conducted in two phases. In the initial phase, qualitative methods are used to refine and improve the intervention model that has been developed for Hmong and Vietnamese patients. This is followed by an experimental study that compares the culturally targeted, family-based psychosocial intervention with a standard attention-control group.