Computable Adherence

Medication adherence, the degree to which patients consume their medications as agreed upon with a provider, continues to be a global problem of "striking magnitude". A lack of a precise understanding of what constitutes adherence has hindered informatics research and development in this area. This paper seeks to reduce definition confusion by presenting a formal (mathematically precise) model of medication adherence. The formalism is applied to the tangible problem of scheduling a patient's next dose of medication and is evaluated for soundness from a clinical perspective.