Polymedication Electronic Monitoring System (POEMS) – introducing a new technology as gold standard for compliance measurement

Non-compliance is no longer simply the patient’s inability to follow the physician’s advice. The phenomenon is complex, its occurence is random, it is affected by multiple factors, its predictability is difficult and its public policy implications have been debated over the past decades. Because the knowledge of a patient’s medication-taking behaviour is a prerequisite for any evaluation of drug effectiveness1, accurate measurement of compliance has gained more and more importance over the years. The ideal measurement of compliance was described a long time ago2,3 and should be simultaneously non-invasive, unobtrusive (to avoid the artifact of monitoring a behaviour), objective (to produce reproducible data for each subject), practical and cheap (to maximise use and minimise costs); it should yield immediate results and not be open to manipulation.