Evaluation of the effect of mobile phone application on treatment success and drug adherence in hypertensive patients

OBJECTIVE: One of the most important factors affecting the prognosis of hypertension disease is the patients' adherence to drug therapy. In our study, it was aimed to show the effect of mobile phone application use on drug adherence. PATIENTS AND METHODS: 50 hypertensive patients were included in the study. The 8-question Morisky Drug Adherence Scale (MMAS-8) was applied to evaluate the drug adherence of the patients. Mobile phone application was loaded and re-evaluated with MMAS-8 after 8 weeks, and the effect of the application on patients' drug adherence and blood pressure was observed. RESULTS: The difference between the patients' systolic blood pressure (SBP) (p <0.001), diastolic blood pressure (DBP) (p <0.05), drug adherence (p = 0.001) was found significant before and after the use of mobile phone application. Before and after application use in geriatric patients, the mean difference between drug adherence (p= 0.006) and SBP(p= 0.016) are significant. The difference was found significant when the drug adherence were evaluated between patients using multiple number of drugs and using less number of drugs. (p= 0,015) CONCLUSIONS: In the study, with the use of mobile phone application, an increase in drug adherence and a decrease in SBP and DBP was observed which is similar with the data in the literature. It is interesting to see that there is a significant improvement in drug adherence and SBP values after the application, especially in geriatric patients and multi-drug users. We think that, especially in multi-drug user patients and geriatric patient groups, mobile application usage will improve drug follow-up and patient participation in treatment of chronic diseases such as hypertension.