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Objective

The aim of this study was to test the SPUR™ tool (originally designed with 45 important questions) and evaluate how effective it was at measuring adherence. 

The 3 key outputs to keep in mind

• SPUR™ is able to identify differences in medication adherence
• SPUR™ is related to social factors related to medication adherence such as income, age and body weight
• SPUR™ gives a holistic indication of the types of behaviors that affect the way patients take their medicine

Methodology

The study recruited 378 adult patients living with type 2 diabetes from a mix of community and secondary-care settings to participate in this non-interventional cross-sectional study. The original SPUR-45 tool was completed by participants with other patient-reported outcome measures for comparison, in addition to the collection of two objective adherence measures; HbA1c and the medication possession ratio (MPR).

Conclusion

The results demonstrated that SPUR™ was the most reliable measure of medication adherence in the study, whilst also providing information about patient behavior. Furthermore, during the study we were able to identify the most important SPUR™ questions, which allowed us to shorten SPUR to only 27 questions in total making the tool even easier for patients to complete. SPUR™ was also associated with social factors that relate to medication adherence such as a patient’s income, age, and body weight, providing further evidence that SPUR™ is a holistic tool.

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