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Pharmacy-Based Approach to Improving Heart Failure Medication Use by Older Adults with Limited Health Literacy: Learning from Interdisciplinary Experience

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Abstract

Heart failure is a chronic disease requiring careful attention to self-care. Patients must follow instructions for diet and medication use to prevent or delay a decline in functional status, quality of life, and expensive care. However, there is considerable heterogeneity in heart failure patients’ knowledge of important care routines, their cognition, and their health literacy, which predict the ability to implement self-care. Our interdisciplinary team of cognitive scientists with health literacy expertise, pharmacists, and physicians spent 18 years designing and testing protocols and materials to assist ambulatory heart failure patients with their care. Our approach is theory- as well as problem-driven, guided by our process-knowledge model of health literacy as it relates to self-care among older adult outpatients with either heart failure or hypertension. We used what we had learned from this model to develop a pharmacy-based protocol and tailored patient instruction materials that were the central component of a randomized clinical trial. Our results showed improved adherence to cardiovascular medications, improved health outcomes and patient satisfaction, and direct cost reductions. These results demonstrate the value of our interdisciplinary efforts for developing strategies to improve instruction and communication with attention to health literacy, which are core components of pharmacy and other ambulatory healthcare services. We believe attention to health literacy with medication use will result in improved health outcomes for older adult patients with heart failure and other complex chronic diseases.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Rachel Gruber, MSIO, CCRP for her assistance with the preparation of this manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Pharmacy, Purdue University, 575 Stadium Mall Drive, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Veronica Bonderski & Michael D. Murray

  2. Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 405 North Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Daniel G. Morrow

  3. Department of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1919 W Taylor St, Chicago, IL, 60612, USA

    Jessie Chin

  4. Regenstrief Institute, 1101 West Tenth Street, Indianapolis, IN, 46202, USA

    Michael D. Murray

Authors
  1. Veronica Bonderski
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michael D. Murray.

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Funding

This research was supported by the National Institute of Aging [R01 AG031718]. Dr Murray’s work on this manuscript was supported by the Regenstrief Foundation and an endowment in medication safety from Purdue University.

Conflict of interest

Veronica Bonderski, Daniel G. Morrow, Jessie Chin, and Michael D. Murray declare that they have no potential conflicts of interest that might be relevant to the contents of this manuscript.

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Bonderski, V., Morrow, D.G., Chin, J. et al. Pharmacy-Based Approach to Improving Heart Failure Medication Use by Older Adults with Limited Health Literacy: Learning from Interdisciplinary Experience. Drugs Aging 35, 951–957 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40266-018-0586-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40266-018-0586-7

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