The Patient Profile: Improving Treatment Adherence

Primary care clinicians have limited time to get to know patients to individualize care delivery and thereby activate patients. Between 46% and 56% of patients misunderstand dosing instructions or medication warnings.1 This partially accounts for the 1.5 million adverse drug events resulting in 117,000 hospitalizations each year.2 To answer the Institute of Medicine’s call “to become a more health literate organization,”3 and in an attempt to improve treatment adherence by deepening relationships and engagement, our health literacy initiative evolved into a whole-person assessment: The Patient Profile