How to Improve Patient Compliance: Key Strategies Explained

Key Takeaways

• Patient compliance measures how closely a patient follows a provider's care plan; adherence rates for patients with multiple chronic conditions range from 44% (measured electronically) to 77% (self-reported).
• One in five new prescriptions is never filled, and about half of those filled aren't taken as directed (CDC).
• The most effective fixes are simplifying the treatment plan, educating patients on their “why,” supporting medication adherence directly, improving two-way communication, setting up reminders, addressing cost/access barriers, and involving caregivers.
• A compliance rate of 80% or higher is generally considered good, though the benchmark varies by condition and measure (PDC/MPR for medications).
• Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) closes the visibility gap between appointments — KangarooHealth's connected-care program reports 85–92% patient compliance.

What Is Patient Compliance and Why It Matters

Patient compliance describes how closely a patient follows their provider's care plan, from taking medications and attending follow-ups to completing home monitoring or recommended lifestyle changes.

The term patient adherence is often used interchangeably, although it places more emphasis on the patient actively participating in their care.

Recent research found adherence rates among patients with multiple chronic conditions ranging from 44% when measured electronically to 77% when self-reported. The CDC also reports that one in five new prescriptions is never filled, while about half of those that are filled aren't taken as directed.

Compliance is especially important for chronic conditions that require ongoing management.

Improving compliance can help you with:

• Better disease management: Consistently following medications, monitoring schedules, and other care recommendations gives the treatment plan a better chance to work as intended and can help reduce complications.
• Fewer avoidable hospital visits: Following medications, monitoring schedules, and follow-up recommendations can help keep chronic conditions better controlled and allow you to address potential problems before they require emergency care or hospitalization.
• Lower healthcare costs: Better compliance can help reduce avoidable emergency care, hospitalizations, additional appointments, and other costs associated with poorly controlled conditions.
• More informed care decisions: Knowing whether a patient has been following the care plan gives you important context when evaluating their progress and deciding whether changes are needed.

Common Barriers to Patient Compliance

Several factors can affect how easily a care plan fits into a patient's daily life. Some relate to the treatment itself, while others come down to cost, access, communication, or practical day-to-day considerations.

Recognizing these barriers can help you understand where patients may need additional support. Some of the most common reasons include:

• Complex treatment plans: Multiple medications, different dosing schedules, frequent monitoring, or several lifestyle changes can be difficult to keep up with.
• Limited understanding: Patients may not fully understand their condition, how to follow the care plan, or why a particular recommendation matters.
• Side effects or treatment concerns: Uncomfortable side effects or treatment concerns can lead patients to skip doses or stop following part of the plan.
• Forgetfulness: Missed medications, home measurements, and appointments can simply come down to forgetting.
• Cost: Medication prices, copays, and other out-of-pocket expenses can affect whether patients fill prescriptions and continue with recommended care.
• Access barriers: Long travel distances, lack of transportation, or difficulty getting an appointment can make it harder to keep up with follow-ups and other parts of the care plan.
• Language and communication barriers: Patients may have difficulty following a plan when instructions aren't provided in a language or format they understand.

How to Improve Patient Compliance

Improving patient compliance isn't about expecting more from patients. It starts with ensuring they have the information, support, and resources needed to follow their care plan consistently.

Here are some practical ways you can support better compliance:

Simplify the Treatment Plan

The more steps a care plan has, the easier it is to miss something.

When clinically appropriate, you can simplify medication schedules, remove unnecessary steps, or make instructions easier to follow. Research on medication adherence has also found that strategies such as fixed-dose combinations and longer prescription supplies can reduce some of the day-to-day burden of treatment.

Clarity matters just as much. Patients should leave knowing what they need to do, how often they need to do it, and who to contact with questions. Some care plans will naturally be complex, so the goal is to make them as manageable as possible.

Educate Patients on Their Condition

A care plan makes more sense when patients understand what's happening with their health and how each recommendation fits into their chronic disease management routine.

For example, a patient with hypertension may know they need to check their blood pressure at home, but not understand why regular readings are needed when they feel fine. Explaining what the numbers tell the care team, why readings need to be taken consistently, and how those readings can help you identify changes between visits gives the patient a clearer reason to keep up with monitoring.

Education should continue beyond the initial visit. The follow-up conversations give you more chances to answer new questions, revisit any new instructions, and reinforce the parts of the care plan that matter most.

Support Medication Adherence

Medications may not be taken as prescribed for many reasons. Forgetfulness is one, but side effects, refill costs, complicated schedules, or concerns about the medication can also affect adherence.

It helps to bring these issues into regular conversations with patients. Depending on what's coming up, your support could be as simple as medication reminders or a pill organizer, or it could mean reviewing side effects, costs, or other concerns with them.

The CDC also recommends reducing medication complexity where possible, such as using once-daily or combination medications, and addressing cost barriers that may make it difficult for patients to fill or continue their prescriptions.

Improve Provider and Patient Communication

Sometimes the most useful information comes from asking a slightly different question.

Instead of only checking whether the patient understands the care plan, you can ask what might make it difficult to follow. That can open conversations about side effects, costs, transportation, daily routines, or treatment concerns that might otherwise not come up.

These conversations matter even more in chronic care, where circumstances can change over months or years. Regular communication gives you and your care team a better understanding of what's happening between visits and where additional education, care coordination, caregiver involvement, or other support could help.

Set Up Reminders and Follow-Up Systems

Remembering every medication, appointment, home measurement, or exercise can be difficult, particularly when a care plan has several moving parts.

Appointment and medication reminders, scheduled calls, home-monitoring schedules, and digital notifications can help patients keep track of what's due.

Follow-up also helps when a routine suddenly changes. If a patient who regularly submits blood pressure readings stops sending them, your care team can check in rather than waiting until the next appointment. It could be something as simple as trouble using the device or a missed reminder.

Address Cost and Access Barriers

A prescription isn't much help if a patient can't afford to fill it. The same goes for a follow-up appointment that's difficult to get to because of distance, transportation, or work.

When cost comes up, you can consider options such as generics, lower-cost medications, assistance programs, or longer-supply prescriptions when appropriate. A clinical trial found that a program that substantially reduced out-of-pocket costs for COPD maintenance inhalers, alongside medication management support, improved medication adherence.

Distance can be a problem too, especially for patients who live in rural places and have a long drive to the clinic. In such cases, you can use RPM for chronic disease management, which gives you access to readings from home without requiring the patient to travel each time.

Involve Family and Caregivers

For some patients, having another person involved can make the care plan easier to manage at home.

With the patient's permission, a family member or caregiver might help keep track of medications, arrange transportation, remember appointments, or support regular home measurements. They may also notice changes that are worth bringing to your care team's attention.

This can be especially helpful when a patient is managing several medications or conditions, has difficulty remembering parts of the care plan, or needs help with everyday tasks such as getting to appointments or taking home measurements.

The Role of Remote Patient Monitoring in Compliance

A lot can happen between appointments. A patient may be asked to check their blood pressure every day, track their glucose, monitor their weight, or follow other parts of a care plan at home. Without regular follow-up, you may have limited visibility into how that's going.

Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) helps close that gap. Connected devices send readings such as blood pressure, blood glucose, weight, or oxygen saturation to your care team, giving you information from outside the clinic.

That can support compliance in a few practical ways:

• Shows whether monitoring is happening: You can see whether prescribed readings are coming in regularly rather than relying on the patient to bring a handwritten log to the next appointment.
• Makes follow-up more timely: If readings stop coming in or the data shows a concerning trend, you have a reason to check in and find out what's going on.
• Keeps patients connected to their care: Regular monitoring and contact with your care team can keep the care plan top of mind between appointments, particularly for patients managing a condition over the long term.
• Reduces access barriers: Patients can complete prescribed monitoring from home, which helps when distance or transportation makes frequent clinic trips difficult.

What RPM does is give you a clearer view of the information being monitored between visits, giving your team more opportunities to spot gaps and follow up when needed. See our Remote Patient Monitoring Best Practices guide for a deeper operational walkthrough.

How KangarooHealth Supports Patient Compliance

KangarooHealth helps you build more consistent support around patients who are managing their care at home. We offer connected care programs that cover 50+ chronic conditions and support 100+ compatible monitoring devices.

That support includes:

• Simpler home monitoring: We help procure and set up connected devices, including cellular options that don't require Wi-Fi or smartphone pairing.
• Ongoing patient support: One-way SMS reminders, secure in-app messaging, and phone and video calls help patients stay engaged with their care plans. Across our connected-care program, we report 85–92% patient compliance.
• Multilingual clinical support: Our multilingual clinical staff can communicate with patients in their preferred language, helping make instructions, follow-ups, and ongoing support easier to understand.
• Provider-defined monitoring and escalation: You set the care plan and escalation protocols for your patients. During operating hours, our clinical monitoring team can review incoming readings and symptoms, follow up with patients when needed, and escalate relevant changes to your team based on those protocols.
• Flexible staffing: You can keep monitoring in-house or use KangarooHealth's white-label clinical team, with support for device procurement, patient onboarding, and staff training.

Schedule a demo to see how our all-in-one connected care platform and flexible clinical monitoring support can help you extend care beyond the clinic.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Here are a few common questions you may have about patient compliance:

How Is Patient Compliance Measured?

It depends on what part of the care plan you're measuring. For medications, common measures include Proportion of Days Covered (PDC) and Medication Possession Ratio (MPR), which use prescription refill data to estimate adherence.

For other parts of care, you may track appointment attendance, home monitoring frequency, completed exercises, device use, or follow-up participation.

What Is a Good Patient Compliance Rate?

A patient compliance rate of 80% or higher is often considered good, although there is no universal benchmark that applies to every care plan or condition. The 80% threshold comes largely from medication adherence, where it is commonly used with measures such as PDC and MPR.

Compliance with appointments, home monitoring, lifestyle changes, or other recommendations needs to be measured against targets appropriate to that specific care plan.

Which Chronic Conditions Have the Lowest Compliance Rates?

There isn't a reliable ranking because compliance rates vary by treatment, patient population, and how adherence is measured.

However, research shows that medication adherence is an ongoing challenge across chronic conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, asthma, and cardiovascular disease, per a PMC review.

What Is the Difference Between Patient Compliance and Adherence?

The terms are often used interchangeably, but there is a slight difference. Compliance traditionally refers to how closely a patient follows the recommendations in their care plan.

Adherence recognizes the patient as an active participant who agrees to and follows the care plan. For that reason, patient-centered healthcare often prefers adherence.

How Long Does It Take to Improve Patient Compliance?

There is no standard timeframe for improving patient compliance. Studies have measured changes anywhere from a few weeks to 12 months, depending on the condition and intervention.

For ongoing care, you can track compliance over time to see whether changes are being followed rather than judging progress from a single follow-up.

Conclusion

Improving patient compliance comes down to giving patients the right support to follow their care plans and giving you enough visibility to know when that support is needed. Remote monitoring can help maintain that connection between appointments.

At KangarooHealth, we have collected 6 million+ physiological data points and completed 200,000+ monitoring hours, helping you maintain a closer view of patient health outside the clinic. With patient-friendly devices, customizable care pathways, and flexible clinical monitoring support, you can build remote care around your patients' needs and the way your team already works.

Schedule a demo with us to see how KangarooHealth can support patient compliance beyond the clinic.