Ogedegbe G. Patients' perceptions of electronic monitoring devices affect medication adherence in hypertensive African Americans. Ann Pharmacother 2008; 42

Poor adherence to prescribed antihy-pertensive medications has been in-dicated as a major contributor to inade-quate blood pressure control.1,2 Electron-ic monitoring devices (EMDs) are regarded in clinical research as the gold standard for assessing rates of medica-tion adherence.3 An EMD provides re-searchers with an indirect, objective as-sessment of adherence that records a temporal history of the date and time of each dosing. In contrast to self-report measures and pill counts, EMDs can re-duce patient overestimation as well as identify intentional pill dumping before clinic appointments.3 Despite the advan-tages of EMDs over traditional adher-ence measures, the majority of hyperten-sion studies that have used EMDs were comprised predominantly of white pa-tients who were monitored for 1–6 months in academic research settings.4-8 Not surprisingly, these studies reported average adherence levels of 90 % or higher. As such, there is a need to under-stand the practicality of using EMDs in community-based practices with low so-cioeconomic status minority patients, who are often at the greatest risk for non-adherence to treatment.9 In this study, we assessed patients’ perceptions of EMDs, their acceptance of EMDs, and the relationship of these perceptions to medication adherence i