Text messages could help Kiwis breathe easier

MEDIA RELEASE

1 May 2012

Text messages could help Kiwis breathe easier

When it comes to asthma, New Zealand is a world leader – but it’s a title we’d rather not have.

More than half a million Kiwis experience asthma symptoms every year, hospitalisation rates have doubled over the past 30 years, and asthma is the most common reason children are admitted to hospital.

But health psychology researchers backed by New Zealand-headquartered Atlantis Healthcare say text message based programmes could help people better manage asthma – as well as other chronic conditions.

Atlantis Healthcare specialises in designing and delivering programmes that improve health outcomes by boosting rates of medicines adherence.

WHO data shows about half of all patients fail to take their medications as prescribed. Non-adherence generates an estimated $US300 billion in avoidable medical spending per year in the US alone, while in Europe, non-adherence is a contributing factor in an estimated 200,000 deaths each year, and costs the economy €125 billion.

Atlantis Healthcare’s Dr Kate Perry says giving people a good understanding of their medical condition is key to making sure they follow their prescribed treatment regimen. Increasingly, the medical and pharmaceutical industries are looking to companies like Atlantis Healthcare to provide people with the tools and techniques they need to effectively manage their health.

Dr Perry, along with fellow Atlantis Healthcare health psychologists Professor Keith Petrie and Professor John Weinman, and Auckland University’s Dr Elizabeth Broadbent, set out to identify whether sending patients with asthma a series of text messages designed to change their beliefs about their illness and treatment would improve adherence to preventer inhaler medication.

“A number of previous studies have highlighted the relationship between people’s beliefs about the nature of asthma and their adherence to preventer inhaler medication,” says Dr Perry.

“We targeted five illness perceptions: short timeline (no symptoms = no asthma), low personal control, low symptoms, high symptoms, and poor understanding; and two medication beliefs: low necessity and high concerns. Participants received tailored text messages based on their responses to a questionnaire assessing their individual beliefs and perceptions.”

The study, results of which were published in a recent British Journal of Health Psychology, showed that after 18 weeks participants receiving the text messages recorded average adherence rates more than one third higher than the control group – and 80 percent plus adherence rates, almost one and a half times higher than the control group.

Dr Perry says the study is not just good news for people with asthma.

“These findings confirm text messaging can be an effective way to actively engage with individual patients and drive behavioural change, which is the foundation of the Atlantis approach to patient support across a range of chronic conditions,” she says.

“Text messaging is relatively cheap, and available to a broad cross-section of the community. It’s also a way of communicating information that people feel comfortable with. This study illustrates how we can use new communications technology to improve people’s quality of life.”
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