The eyeGuide: Improving Glaucoma Self-management With a Personalized Behavior Change Program

Despite evidence from randomized clinical trials that medication reduces vision loss from glaucoma, it remains the second leading cause of blindness in the United States. A critical barrier to preventing vision loss is that about one-half of glaucoma patients are essentially "untreated" because they do not adhere to their medications. Ineffective self-management behaviors and poor clinical outcomes disproportionately affect the most vulnerable members of US society. The increased burden of glaucoma due to an aging US population, together with a projected shortage of ophthalmologists, will make team-based care essential. There is a critical need to develop and test team-based, personalized behavior change interventions for glaucoma patients to improve medication adherence and the outcomes of care.

Poor adherence to effective medications is a critical barrier to better outcomes in glaucoma patients. The World Health Organization stated that "increasing the effectiveness of adherence interventions may have a far greater impact on the health of the population than any improvement in specific medical treatments." Once diagnosed with glaucoma, at least half of patients do not adhere to their glaucoma medication regimen, return for follow-up, or persist with their medications over the longer term. Patients who are not adherent have more severe visual field loss, which leads to steep declines in health-related quality of life and increased risk of falls and motor vehicle accidents.

Adherence to glaucoma medications is rarely addressed during the clinical encounter because education and counseling programs are not part of standard glaucoma care. Focus groups have demonstrated that patients often have a poor understanding of glaucoma and its treatment. In addition to knowledge gaps, patients have numerous concrete and psychological barriers to managing their glaucoma. In addition, eye drop instillation is rarely taught, and many patients cannot properly instill their medications.

Uniform, scripted approaches to improve adherence do not work. However, complex, individualized counseling interventions, especially those based in motivational interviewing (MI), have improved adherence and health outcomes in many chronic diseases. MI is a style of counseling that engages patients by discussing priorities and obstacles to facilitate intrinsic motivation to change health behavior. Few complex interventions based on these successful principles have been rigorously tested and none implemented into glaucoma care. The eyeGuide is a web-based personally tailored behavior change program based on MI principles, a systematic review of the glaucoma adherence literature, and data from focus groups, surveys and iterative beta-testing with glaucoma patients. It provides individually tailored disease information and support to facilitate MI-based conversations between patients and paraprofessional staff to improve medication adherence. Such technology-based electronic health (eHealth) innovations have great potential to extend the reach of physicians by enabling team-based care.

In this pilot study, the study will test the impact of two personalized eHealth technologies on medication adherence among non-adherent glaucoma patients in a pre-post design: 1) real time automated adherence reminders; and 2) the eyeGuide counseling program. The study will explore the effects of these interventions on secondary outcomes including psychosocial mediators of adherence (e.g. motivation, self-efficacy, satisfaction), intraocular pressure (IOP), and IOP fluctuation.