Poor compliance of prescription medication is an ongoing public health crisis. Nearly half of
patients do not take their medication as prescribed, harming their own health while also
increasing public healthcare costs. Despite these detrimental consequences, prior research has
struggled to establish cost-effective and scalable interventions to improve adherence rates.
We suggest that one reason for the limited success of prior interventions is that they make the
personal health costs of non-adherence insufficiently prominent, while a higher saliency of
these costs may motivate patients to adhere more. In the current research, we test whether an
intervention that makes the personal health costs of non-compliance more salient for patients
will increase their medication adherence. To do so, we conducted a randomized controlled
trial with 16,191 patients across 278 UK pharmacies over an eight-month time period and
manipulated the perceived consequences of medication non-adherence. We find that patients
who received a treatment highlighting the personal health costs of non-compliance were
significantly more likely to adhere to their medication than three comparison groups (odds
ratio = 1.84, CI95% [1.37; 2.47]). Shifting patients’ focus to the personal health costs of noncompliance may thus offer a potentially cost-effective and scalable approach to improve
medication adherence
