While healthcare practitioners across all areas of medicine are feeling the squeeze of growing caseloads, their patients are expecting more – more time, more attention, more flexibility, more individualized solutions, and more practitioner engagement with their personal wellness journey. In other words, they are demanding excellence when it comes to the patient experience.
Excellence requires going the extra mile to deliver a more holistic approach to patient care, one that extends far beyond the prescription pad. Before deciding on a course of action, a practitioner must thoughtfully consider how a treatment will realistically fit into the life of that patient.
If a practitioner knows a treatment would be effective in theory, but suspects their patient will likely fail to comply with the treatment, should they prescribe it anyway?
Who is ultimately responsible for making it as easy as possible for patients to “follow doctor’s orders?”
The trouble with patient compliance
The trouble with poor patient compliance is that nobody really owns the problem. The healthcare industry is well acquainted with the positive correlation between better patient compliance and improved health outcomes. The industry is also aware of the factors contributing to poor patient compliance, among them: poor health literacy, complexity of treatment routines, cost, lack of social support, misinformation online, cultural beliefs, psychological factors, and more.
Many of these factors are external, society-wide challenges. However, there is one factor that is well under our control: closing the information gap between what practitioners are witnessing from patients, and what features medical innovators are prioritizing in their laboratories. When new therapeutics are developed without considering the patient experience, we risk creating something that works great in the lab – but not in the real world.
Take a look at elemental diets, for example.
An elemental diet is a temporary liquid diet that provides nutrients in their most basic building blocks. Proteins, fats, and carbohydrates absorb into the first 2-4 feet of the small intestine with no irritants and almost no digestive effort, allowing the body to rest and recover.
Elemental diets have been around since the 1940s, originally administered by hospitals to provide nutrition to patients who could not consume enough otherwise. In the decades since, they have also been used to manage chronic inflammatory conditions like Crohn’s disease and are clinically proven to help patients reduce gut distress and eradicate the disruptor bacteria contributing to Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO).
Yet, practitioners across specialties avoid recommending elemental diets to their patients. Why? Because they are aware of one key flaw – elemental diets have historically tasted so awful that patients refuse to drink them.
An academic paper published in 2004 found that up to 41% of elemental diet trial participants elect to withdraw from trials because they are unable to tolerate the taste of the drinks. It was not until 2023 that a clinical trial at Cedars-Sinai successfully achieved 100% patient compliance with two weeks of exclusive elemental diet.
The power of a patient’s perspective
In full disclosure, my company developed that palatable elemental diet drink – and unsurprisingly, our founder was a GI patient named Krystyna Houser who refused to accept that after years of searching, her only remaining pathway to relief involved drinking something so unpleasant for weeks at a time.
It was her patient perspective that gave our team of gastroenterologists and food scientists the information needed to create something that patients could actually use. It was her own struggles with patient compliance that inspired and shaped our extensive patient support program for people attempting the elemental diet in the real world.
We all have a role to play
Practitioners serve on the front lines of patient compliance, and their feedback from patients is critical to identify areas for improvement and future research. Keep a watchful eye on patient compliance, and when you notice it dropping, engage patients to ask why, and offer help.
Feel empowered to pick up the phone and be an advocate for your patients. Give feedback to medical food and pharmaceutical companies on what’s not working for your patients and why. Forge working relationships with researchers and therapy developers in your area of practice who are open to swapping ideas on how to make treatments a little easier and more enjoyable.
Who owns the problem of poor patient compliance? We all do. Excellence in patient compliance is a core tenet of my company’s mission – but imagine the benefit to humanity if all sectors of our industry worked together to prioritize the same.
Nicola Wodlinger
Nicola Wodlinger is leading a revolution in the intersection of nutrition and medicine. She is the Chief Executive Officer of mBIOTA Labs, a company working to improve the lives of people who are struggling with chronic and severe gastrointestinal issues. Nicola has launched several brands from the ground up across the e-commerce and digital content space and has held pivotal leadership roles at iconic brands including Rolling Stone and Us Weekly, where she spearheaded initiatives and built multi-million-dollar brand partnerships.
