Non-adherence in health care: Are patients or policy makers ill-informed?

Non-adherence in health care results when a patient does not initiate or continue care that a provider has recommended. Researchers have identified non-adherence as a major source of waste in US health care, totaling approximately 2.3% of GDP, and have therefore proposed a plethora of interventions to improve adherence. However, non-adherence is commonly misattributed to ill-informed or irrational patients without an understanding of the underlying forces. This leads to harmful policy efforts to raise adherence by ill-informed policy wonks rather than patients. The administration’s Precision Medicine Initiative is a more useful approach towards appropriate adherence behavior.