International Journal of Nursing

Using Electronic Daily Reminders to Improve Patient Adherence
Valentin O. Rivish, DNP, RN, NE-BC

Abstract
On a Home Telehealth (HT) program, by doing a HT session daily, patients have the opportunity to receive education, learn mechanisms by which to manage their chronic diseases, and be monitored daily for the duration of the program by a nurse care coordinator. Many patients, however, do not adhere to doing a daily HT session. This paper describes a quality improvement project looking at 40 Veterans at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care System (PVAHCS) and applying an evidence-based practice (EBP) process where electronic daily reminders were implemented to see if that would increase the adherence of doing daily HT sessions. The following PICOT question was utilized: In Veterans participating in the Home Telehealth program at the Phoenix VA Health Care System will implementing electronic daily reminders to document health status improve adherence to the program requirements? After four weeks of the intervention, the average response rate significantly improved from 48.1% to 56.6%. The proportion of participants achieving a minimum of a 70% response rate Post-Intervention was 35.0% and 24 participants (60.0%) increased Home Telehealth response rate from Pre- to Post-Intervention. This cost-effective intervention of implementing electronic daily reminders to Veterans may be the answer to many HT departments struggling to increase the participation rates or adherence of their patients.

Full Text: PDF     DOI: 10.15640/ijn.v4n2a5