Rheumatoid Arthritis

Motivational Interviewing as a Patient-Centered Behavioral Intervention to Improve Medication Adherence in Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients with Inadequately Controlled Disease Activity

The overall goal of the proposed initiative is to investigate the effectiveness of motivational interviewing (MINT) as a behavioral intervention to improve medication adherence as part of an established patient‐centered disease management program for patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Using the self‐determination theory of health behavior as our conceptual framework, we will evaluate the effect of motivational interviewing (MINT) as part of a patientcentered intervention to improve medication adherence. We propose a non‐randomized single intervention study to determine whether MINT can improve medication adherence. This study will leverage the large RA population across the NYU campus, with our established patient‐centered RA disease management program and clinical research infrastructure. We will perform MINT on 200 RA patients with inadequately controlled RA disease activity (moderate or high disease activity) who are receiving at least one oral disease modifying anti‐rheumatic medication (DMARD). Our key objectives are two‐fold: 1) We expect to identify patient‐specific barriers to be addressed via MINT that will improve medication adherence; 2) We anticipate improvement in medication adherence associated with a MINT intervention as part of an ongoing systematic disease activity management program for RA patients. We will evaluate the effectiveness of MINT by calculating the improvement in the Medication Possession Ratio (MPR) after 6 months of MINT intervention compared to baseline.