Do we know how to influence patients' behaviour? Tips to improve patients' adherence.

This paper discusses the importance of achieving patients' compliance with a health care provider's recommendations. It includes a summary of the different approaches and meanings given by different researchers to the term compliance. Different methods of measuring compliance are described. The aim of the paper is to provide health care professionals, especially physicians, with the necessary background information to interpret compliance studies and, more importantly, to present different strategies that have been proved to be effective at improving patients' compliance (adherence) with medical recommendations.