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School Faculty Member Receives NIH Grant to Study Unusual Technology

Annie Lam, senior lecturer in pharmacy at the UW School of Pharmacy, is among a team of UW faculty members who recently received a $429,000 National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to study a technology that could advance health literacy. The NIH funding will support a two-year project called “Improving Medication Adherence for Patients with Low Functional Health Literacy: An Intervention with Talking Pill Bottles.”

Under the direction of principal investigator Dr. Seth Wolpin, a research assistant professor in the School of Nursing, Lam will join Drs. Ann Kurth from the School of Nursing and William Lober from the School of Public Health in assessing the functionality of “talking pill bottles.” The pill bottles come with a technology that allows pharmacists to record their prescription instructions into a chip with a 60-second recording capability. This technology is intended to help pharmacy patients with low literacy levels or who are sight-impaired.

Talking pill bottles are not currently available to the general public, but they have been made available to some consumers in California in recent years. Although they would come with a higher price tag than standard pill bottles, their potential long-term benefits — namely an increased ability for certain patients to follow sometimes-complex medication directions — might be worth it.

The NIH-funded study will recruit participants through the Fred Meyer pharmacy in Renton, specifically targeting people with hypertension who have limitations with health literacy. The researchers chose to focus on hypertension because populations with health-literacy challenges often have a higher prevalence of that disease.

As co-investigator and project director of the two-year project, Lam will help Fred Meyer’s pharmacists and technicians develop the recorded scripts on the talking bottles, among other things.

Lam has a background working with patients with hypertension. In fact, she recently won the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists’ 2008 Practice Innovation Award for a seven-year community hypertension-monitoring program she created to serve indigent, older Asian people in Seattle’s International District. Read U Week article

“Annie brings a world of experience in health literacy, culturally appropriate communication, medication adherence and patient counseling to the project as well as her enthusiasm,” said Wolpin.

Through the study, the investigators seek to demonstrate that audio-assisted medication instructions can have a positive impact on health literacy and medication adherence, said Wolpin. Indeed, the technology could ultimately improve the health of underserved populations.

“This could be a little step toward improving the quality of care in prescription medications at the point of dispensing,” said Lam. “[The bottles] can address the limitations of patients who do not have the ability to manage their prescriptions well because either they forget the instructions or they can’t read them….So we’re trying to work with a population that we think will benefit from it the most.”

-November 10, 2008