When Less Is More: Can Reduced Health Monitoring Improve Patient Behavior?

Abstract

Mexico's largest healthcare provider recently began issuing automatic-re ll prescriptions to stable hypertensive patients, thus reducing the frequency of health monitoring from 30- to 90-day intervals. Exploiting this change, I find that lower monitoring implies no drawbacks in health outcomes and actually improves an important health behavior: medication adherence. The number of days when patients are out of medication between fillings falls by 2.6 days -- an improvement in adherence of 7.5%. Furthermore, patients appear to value being on a low-frequency regime as they improve adherence to remain on it, suggesting that lower monitoring could be used as a "reward" to promote healthy behaviors.