Improving compliance among hypertensives: a triage criterion with cost-benefit implications.

Triage method based upon individual patient characteristics is developed to determine the most effective health education interventions for hypertensive patients. The sample included 402 patients randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The efficacy of a triage process, whereby patients are subdivided into groups that are more predisposed to benefit from a given health education approach, is discussed. From a limited cost-benefit evaluation, it appears that the benefits of the triage method for achieving medication compliance clearly outweigh its costs only in the case of the highly depressed patients (24 per cent of the sample). Different levels of depression were found to be differentially responsive to different health education treatments for achieving adherence to medication. The most depressed patients were more responsive to family member reinforcement, a 156 per cent increase in the number of high compliers as compared to no intervention.