Patients often get the blame for uncontrolled hypertension.
Medication noncompliance is high among patients with hypertension, and for most of the 120 million adults in the US living with high blood pressure, the condition is uncontrolled.
Robert Matthews
The larger problem, however, is not patients forgoing their medications but physicians failing to prescribe the right therapy, says Robert E. Matthews, vice president of quality and care design for PriMed Physicians, a medical group with 14 practices in and around Dayton, Ohio.
The magnitude of the many drug and patient variables, combinations and classes of medications, and causes of hypertension make choosing the correct regimen "a complexity problem that is beyond the capabilities of human cognition," he said.
"We're asking primary care doctors to go into a room and sort through 80, 90 variables in their heads in a 15-minute visit. That's not going to work," said Matthews, who is president and CEO of MediSync, a company that provides performance improvement solutions and management tools to medical practices. "We have to make it easier and better for doctors to, first, pick the right medicine, and second, to communicate with patients so that patients take that medicine."
