Medication Adherence Expertise Center Of the northern Netherlands (MAECON)

‘Drugs don’t work in people who don’t take them’ (a quote attributed to C. Everett Coop, former US Surgeon General). The ageing society is a key contributor to a steady increase in the number of patients with a chronic disease and multimorbidity. This requires a multifaceted response, which often involves lifetime medication use.

Poor adherence
Most medications have proven their efficacy in large randomised clinical trials. However, in practice, the effectiveness of medications often turns out to be much lower. This is largely due to poor medication adherence. Depending on the disease and definitions used, medication non-adherence is found in up to 50% of patients who are using chronic medication. It is important to note that, in the European Union alone, medication non-adherence is associated with an estimated 200,000 deaths and €125 billion of potentially preventable direct costs, such as hospital admissions and drug waste, as well as potentially preventable indirect costs, such as productivity loss at work.

Implementation platform
In the last decades, there has been little improvement in medication adherence. Unfortunately, this applies to the whole range of chronic diseases. The fragmentation of medication adherence research, poor awareness among stakeholders, lack of effective and personalized strategies, and poor implementation and incentives in daily clinical practice are some of the key factors contributing to the poor results in terms of progress and change. To achieve real progress in medication adherence, make better use of existing medications, and ultimately foster healthy ageing of societies, the time has come to unite all forces into one adherence expertise centre that serves as a knowledge hub as well as an implementation platform.