Does patient education or contingency contracting improve adherence and lower blood pressure in hypertensive patients compared to routine clinic care?
Contingency contracting is an effective strategy for improving adherence and lowering diastolic blood pressure in hypertensive patients, whereas patient education alone may be ineffective and increase dropout rates.
In the treatment of hypertension, problems of nonadherence and consequent poor blood pressure control are particularly severe. Alternative intervention strategies were compared to explore means of improving adherence and lowering blood pressures. In a 3 x 4 repeated measures analysis of variance design, 115 patients were randomly selected and randomly assigned to one of three treatment modalities (routine clinic care, patient education, and contingency contracting) and were followed over four clinic visits. Subjects' knowledge about hypertension and its management, adherence to requests for regular medical follow-up, and blood pressure levels were measured. Patient education was not effective in lowering blood pressures; it produced an untoward outcome, a dropout rate higher than that for patients receiving only routine clinic care. However, contingency contracting was an effective intervention strategy for improving patient knowledge, F (1,59) = 51.32, p less than .0001; adherence to requests for regular medical care, Max L (2) = 25.9, p less than .0001; and decreasing diastolic blood pressures, F (2,49) = 3.39, p less than .05.
Swain et al. (Sun,) studied this question.