iMedPAL: Improving Medical Prescription Adherence by Leveraging Mobile Technology
A mobile application for facilitating medication adherence for adolescent transplant patients.
Medical Need:
In the US, there are over 25,000 pediatric recipients of organs every year. To prevent organ rejection, these patients must strictly adhere to treatment programs that require a combination of immunosuppressants and steroids that must be taken throughout the day and must be taken for the rest of their lives.
Adolescence is a time period when patients are often tasked with taking on greater responsibility for their care as they transition to adulthood and adult-based medical care settings. However, current research indicates that adolescents are the least adherent group to their post-transplant medication regimen with rates reported as high as nearly 2/3 of this population. These high rates of medication non-adherence have significant implications for health outcomes and the concomitant financial cost of medical care. For example, adolescent kidney transplant recipients have lower graft survival rates at 3 and 5 years post-transplant of any age group except the elderly. Non-adherence can result in rejection episodes, increased hospitalizations and frequency of medical follow-ups, and death. Thus, maintaining adherence is critical not only for the transition to adulthood but for long-term health and quality of life.
Improving Medical Prescription Adherence by Leveraging Mobile Technology (iMedPAL) provides a novel, multifaceted approach to addressing medication non-adherence and ultimately improving health outcomes for the adolescent transplant-recipient population. The mobile app will be incorporated into the daily care management routine and be a portable resource for patients as they navigate between various environments (e.g., school and home). Patients will be trained on how to use the mobile application as part of their post-transplant teaching prior to discharge from the hospital following organ transplantation. Via the companion web components, parents and medical providers will be able to check-in more readily to address adherence issues early on as well as provide praise for appropriate efforts. Application usage rates, satisfaction, and adherence indicators (e.g., regularly scheduled labs for monitoring medication levels as specified by clinical care guidelines of the transplant teams as well as organ-specific markers for rejection) will be monitored over time to assess clinical utility and feasibility.
Disclaimer: Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute Of Allergy And Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R43AI118114. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health Product under development, not yet FDA approved
(Award R43AI118114 is titled: “iMedPAL: Improving Medical Prescription Adherence by Leveraging Mobile”)
*This application is currently in an active trial and is not available for public use