Around half of all patients do not take their treatment as prescribed. This ‘non-adherence’ to treatment can have a dramatic impact on patients’ health and quality of life, resulting in avoidable hospitalisations and contributing to an estimated 200 000 deaths annually in the EU.

Currently, we do not fully understand all the factors that influence patients’ decisions regarding their treatments. The BEAMER project aims to add to our understanding of the factors that influence patient adherence across disease areas, and deliver guidance that various stakeholders could use to address patients’ needs and boost adherence.

The project will create a model of the main factors affecting patient adherence to treatment and test it in pilot studies involving 18 000 patients in 6 countries. This will allow the project team to define non-adherence and develop guidance that healthcare stakeholders could transform into tools and solutions to improve adherence. The model will not be disease specific, but it will be possible for users to add disease-specific elements. This will make the model more widely applicable to different groups of patients.