Text messages motivate patients to finish medicine regimen

A study has found that simple text message reminders to take malaria medication could help in the fight against the disease by boosting the rates at which patients complete their medication regimen.

Julia Raifman, a Ph.D. candidate in the Harvard School of Public Health has said that only when patients don't complete their full medication regimen, diseases develop resistance to treatment and with infectious diseases like malaria, drug resistant diseases could spread to others.

The research staff in Ghana had recruited more than 1,100 people outside pharmacies and healthcare facilities, who then used their mobile phones to enroll in an automated system.

The system had randomly assigned half to receive the text message reminders to take their medication at the 12 hour intervals corresponding to when the pills were to be taken.

The local staff had followed up with the participants several days later at their homes to check how many pills they had taken.

Study authors have found that those who received the texts were significantly more likely to finish the full regimen.

The study was published in PLOS ONE.