Using Different Research Methods for Medication Adherence

Pharmacy Times spoke to Melissa Castora Binkley, PQA Senior Director of Research, about different research projects using PQA's methods.

Castora-Binkley: A quantitative research project that we're doing right now is looking at how medication adherence is related to outcomes. This is an area where there's actually a lot of research and a lot of evidence that suggests that adherence is associated with outcomes. But we're going to dive a little bit deeper into the disparities and how there's disparities in terms of outcomes related to adherence. For qualitative research, we have a really cool project where we're interviewing patients to find out more about their experience with comprehensive medication reviews. So it's really important to make sure we understand the patient experience and there are calls for more measures related to patient experience and patient reported outcomes. But sometimes you have to take a step back and start with the evidence and sometimes you find out that there's not enough evidence to support a measure. So right now we're building that evidence base by talking to patients understanding their experiences, and eventually creating a conceptual framework which will lead us to a tool to actually measure patient experience related to comprehensive medication reviews.