Abstract
For patients with chronic medical conditions, adherence to treatment represents a key but often overlooked predictor of health outcomes. Numerous patient, provider, and healthcare system factors may facilitate or impede optimal adherence to medical treatment recommendations. Researchers have documented poor adherence to therapies across disease states, including diabetes, HIV, hypertension, asthma, cancer, and psychiatric conditions, among others. Nonetheless, clinicians often overestimate adherence or fail to consider nonadherence as a reason for inadequate response to treatments. In this chapter, we will focus on medication adherence in patients with chronic illnesses. Specifically, we examine rates of nonadherence to prescribed medications, intentional and unintentional factors associated with poor adherence, methods of assessment, and intervention strategies aimed at enhancing medication adherence. Drawing on the scholarly literature and our own clinical research, we will illustrate practical strategies that can be integrated into general medical or psychiatric care for optimizing adherence to selfadministered medications among patients with chronic conditions.