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Understanding Human Behavior To Help Improve Patient Adherence

BEAMER is delighted to announce that its project lead Claire Everitt, the Device Design and Engineering Team Leader in R&D at Pfizer and Aad R. Liefveld, a project member, have authored an article titled ‘Understanding Human Behavior To Help Improve Patient Adherence‘ published in Clinical Leader.

Unveiling the Urgent Context:

This article has been published due to the recognition of patient behaviour as a pivotal factor influencing the outcome of a treatment. Despite considerable efforts within the healthcare industry to bolster patient adherence through various means such as improving patient experiences, and fostering collaborative decision-making between healthcare professionals and patients, statistics indicate that these efforts have not substantially impacted adherence rates. This is why the BEAMER project was set up – to help address the persistent issue of low adherence rates in patient treatment and support. It is specifically designed with the aim of enhancing patient support and improving treatment adherence within healthcare systems.

The article, accessible here, illuminates the crucial factors that impact treatment adherence in healthcare.

Targeting real-world adherence improvements: BEAMER’s main goal is to significantly improve real-world adherence by emphasizing the necessity for stakeholders to embrace a model that goes beyond theory, emphasising simplicity, practicality, proven effectiveness, and reliance on factors that we can influence.

Validated: Validation through clinical studies involving 18,000 patients across six diverse treatment areas aims to establish the model’s effectiveness and disease-agnostic understanding, crucial for its acceptance and implementation as the basis for practical solutions.

Clinical Care and Clinical Research: Non-adherence is considered a greater issue during clinical care than in clinical studies; however, genuine issues also exist in clinical studies. After decades of improving clinical studies, the early dropout rate, across all conditions, is still substantial: up to 30%. Non-adherence therefore has a major effect on timelines, costs, efficacy, and clinical data sets.

Three years from now, the BEAMER project will deliver an environment where healthcare stakeholders can check a patient’s behavioral phenotype and the type of support needed to sustain or improve adherence behavior. Here, researchers can run simulations for specific treatments and target populations.

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Healthcare Professional

The primary aim of the end user personas is to support the creation of materials to support the implementation of the BEAMER model framework and to help define requirements for the elements of the BEAMER model framework. Hence, healthcare professionals (HCPs) represent the primary envisaged end user group of the BEAMER model framework and the associated Adherence Intelligence Visualisation Platform (AIVP)

It is one learning from the joint design process that the job titles of healthcare professional team members do not necessarily predict the roles they would play within the change management process for implementing BEAMER and installing it as a standard model within healthcare. Additionally, the role and responsibilities of certain job titles, for example nurse, varies across different healthcare systems and would affect how they interact with the BEAMER model outputs and the access they would be permitted and so it would not be helpful to include these job titles: The four personas represent role-independent archetypes within the group of HCPs. They encompass a Managerial HCP Persona, an Implementer HCP Persona, a Support HCP Persona, and a Established HCP Persona.

These healthcare professional personas may be further tailored to specific healthcare settings depending on the needs of the individual pilot sites. Thus, adapted or spin-off versions of these original personas may be considered. The persona displays include a summarising statement, goals, challenges, experience, and needs to enhance the accessibility and usability of the model while minimising user burden.

Patient Organisation

Patient organisations are considered potential users of the model outputs. Consequently, personas were designed for these groups to assure that the implementation materials may also support their needs in the longer term, thus fostering sustainability of the project outputs.

The identified focus areas within this persona are goals, needs, skills and tools, along with potential challenges anticipated during the implementation process. The persona emphasises awareness-raising, capacity building, education, peer support provision, and the promotion of research and development in therapeutic care.

The patient organisation persona serves as a theoretical framework representing how patient organisations could benefit from and include the BEAMER model framework in their therapy and care related as well as their organisational work. This persona comprises the needs, goals, challenges and necessary tools, facilitating preparation and implementation of the model and optimising the user experience of patient organisations as end users of the BEAMER model framework. It can be used as a guide to identify potential obstacles and understand the prerequisites for a patient organisation to successfully adopt and integrate the BEAMER model framework.

“In implementing the BEAMER model, we want to be able to respond to the different needs of our patients to ensure their adherence, build a supportive community and improve outcomes.”