Medication Adherence Research: Research Themes and Thought Leadership within IS

• Published in: Journal of the Southern Association for Information Systems Vol. 12; no. 1; p. 1
• Main Authors: Gimpel, Gregory, Jung, Sunjin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Atlanta Association for Information Systems 01.01.2025
• Subjects: Content analysis; Health care; Information systems; Patient compliance
• ISSN: 2325-3940; 2325-3940
• DOI: 10.17705/3JSIS.00036

Medication adherence (MA), or taking medicine as prescribes by a doctor, is one of the most important aspects of healthcare. Despite decades of research, about half of patients still do not take their medications properly, resulting in suboptimal – and often poor – health. This creates significant economic and societal hardship and results in avoidable human suffering. Information systems and digital tools offer new ways to address this persistent healthcare challenge. This study characterizes the state of medication adherence research within the information systems domain. Through content analysis and thematic clustering, this article identifies research streams focused on medication adherence within the information systems domain. It identifies five themes, which can be subdivided into seven themes: literature reviews, technical reviews, technology adoption, measuring MA, conceptual artifact design, proof of concept field tests and randomized controlled trials. It finds that this research domain has hit an inflection point and is accelerating. Currently, research on the topic is scattered among researchers and institutions, but highly concentrated in a handful of journals. It also finds that mainstream information researchers and journals are ceding their thought leadership to other disciplines and specialty publications.