AUA MPH Alumna and lead author Seda Aghabekyan, MD, MPH (2009) and her coauthors Michael E. Thompson, MS, DrPH, Associate Professor of Public Health Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Adjunct Associate Professor at AUA and Lusine Abrahamyan, MD, PhD, MPH (2003), Collaborator at the Toronto Health Economics and Technology Assessment (THETA) Collaborative, University of Toronto, report in their manuscript Medication Noncompliance and Patient Satisfaction Following Percutaneous Coronary Intervention: Armenia that “nearly one-third of patients undergoing coronary revascularization in Armenia do not follow the recommended post-surgery medication regimen. The burden of out-of pocket expenses is associated with a more than two-fold increased odds of medication non-compliance. Patient satisfaction and other measures of the relationship between patient and provider showed no effect on the odds of medication non-compliance. Disconcertingly, healthier patients had reduced odds of medication noncompliance (i.e., were more compliant) than less healthy patients.” These findings were published 21 May 2012 in the advance online access (“early view”) of the Journal of Interventional Cardiology, a prestigious internationally ranked peer-reviewed academic journal (see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1540-8183/earlyview).
As Varduhi Petrosyan, MS, PhD, Director of the Center for Health Services Research and Development and Associate Dean of the College of Health Sciences (CHS), notes, “this manuscript arose from a master thesis project grounded in CHS’s long running partnership for hospital quality improvement with the Nork Marash Medical Center (NMMC). The partnership has produced a number of peer-reviewed publications which enrich our knowledge of treatment methods and outcomes of coronary artery disease in Armenia and confirm that the quality of services at NMMC is on par with its international peers.”