Text Messages from Doctors Help Patients Follow Through on Meds, Says Study

Doctors who send their patients text messages, especially when it is about reminding them to take their medications, could increase the success rate of the sick getting better. The habit of texting should be instilled among health workers especially if the patient is battling a chronic illness, a new study suggested.

Researchers published their findings in the JAMA Internal Medicine journal and detailed that they have done 16 clinical trials to test their hypothesis.

Apart from the medication reminders, some participants of the trial were also sent personal messages that included jokes and quotes from the health workers while other participants only received text messages instructing them about medical dispensers. In both cases, the researches saw that the texts brought "cost-effective, practical and adaptable" results, CNN reported.

Some 3,000 chronically-ill patients were monitored for this study and 68 percent of them actually complied with their medication regularly because of the texts, Med City News reported.

A previous study into text messaging patients, which was also published in the JAMA journal, suggested that there could be a 50 percent success rate in patients getting better. The focus of this study was on patients with coronary diseases.

"Text messaging support programs have immense potential in health care," said Clara Chow, the lead author for both studies, via KTBS. Chow pointed out that the system addresses the problem with medication adherence and health workers are aware that there are who patients fail to stick to their prescribed medication schedule. As a result, many end up regressing from their condition.

"It is difficult to remain committed to long-term medication therapy for patients with chronic disease, and as many as half of patients can be non-adherent in a year," the expert added. "If text message-based support improves medical adherence, it has the potential to prevent major clinical events such as heart attacks, strokes and premature death."

However, the study had a few limitations as Chow and her team only conducted the trial for 12 weeks. Long-term results will need to be studied further and done with a larger group to support previous experiments.

"We still need to better understand what feature of the text message programs make them most effective," Chow said.

Dr. Brian Haynes, who wrote a commentary in the study, cautioned that these results should not be over-interpreted. Though is a potential, it's still too early for doctors, hospitals and health workers to impose text programs for their patients.