The Top Ten Patient Compliance Points: #10
David Letterman’s cameo on this blog has prompted me to compile AlignMap’s own Top Ten List1
#10. Complacency about compliance leads to treatment failure
If you know that 75% or more of your patients follow your treatment recommendations, one of the following explanations holds:
- You are charismatic, empathic, and knowledgeable — and incredibly lucky. If enough poker players try drawing to an inside straight enough times, someone — somewhere — sometime — does eventually end up with that hand. So, sure, it’s possible that 75% of your patients are compliant. If you’re this lucky, however, let’s you and me go buy some lottery tickets.
- You are incredibly charismatic, empathic, and knowledgeable but are no luckier than the rest of us schmucks. You also sustain a charmingly naive confidence in human nature despite evidence to the contrary, tend to invest heavily in Franklin Mint commemorative plates depicting the official fungus of each state, continue to expect the check that (you have been assured) is in the mail, and believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows.
A reasonable rule of thumb is that 50% of patients do not comply with treatment recommendations.
Footnotes
- Yeah, I know — Dave’s Top Ten Lists are a lot funnier but just see how much they improve adherence to scheduled clinical appointments. And, we acknowledge that the content of the original Top Ten (AKA The Ten Commandments) has not required any patches, let alone major revisions, in the past few thousand years (although we would submit that since the first set of tablets crashed — literally — the current revision is arguably the 1.1 version). Our product is just more — uh — flexible. [back]
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