Treatment Compliance in the Long-Term Paranoid Schizophrenia Telemedicine Study

Abstract

Schizophrenia is a chronic disease with a relatively high relapse rate. Different methods are introduced to improve compliance of the patients treated by psychiatrists; among them, a new and promising attitude is telepsychiatry. The 12-month clinical study of the compliance in paranoid schizophrenia was performed on the group of 199 patients. Every patient in the study was given a smartphone with the preinstalled original telemedicine platform (Telemedicine MoneoPlatform). The telemedicine system recorded every confirmation of the drug intake, and according to that, the compliance was counted as the percent of the doses of medication confirmed in relation to the planned ones. In the first month of the study, patients confirmed only 47.6% of the doses as taken. When analyzed in the total group, the compliance significantly decreased over the 12-month period (p < 0.001). The compliance observed in our study is lower in comparison with short-term studies, but to our knowledge, this project is the biggest long-term study of the treatment compliance in schizophrenia, performed on a large number of patients, and a possible conclusion is that the adherence in longer lasting project depends highly on the engagement of both patients and psychiatrists.