Closing the Gap in Infectious Disease Adherence and Linkage to Care
Our infectious disease evidence spans real-world programs, conducted across clinical and community settings with a focus on populations facing the greatest barriers to care.
Key Findings in HIV
94% Adherence Among Low-Barrier Patients
64% Reported at Least One SDOH Barrier
91% Confidence in Taking ART (+24% increase)
In a high-risk, predominantly Medicaid-insured population, adherence failure was driven primarily by structural barriers rather than behavioral ones. The platform identified which patients were struggling and why, enabling care teams to deploy targeted support where it was needed most.
Findings from a quality improvement initiative presented at IDWeek 2025. Supported by an independent educational grant from Gilead Sciences.
"The Tappt technology helped us track some people. When I say track, it helped us see who was not adherent, if they took their medication, and if they didn't, assess what the barriers were for them to take those medications.”
— Dr Karim Ba, Optimus HealthcareHear from the Expert
Dr. Karim Ba of Optimus Healthcare shares how real-time monitoring supported HIV adherence and care engagement in a high-risk patient population.
“I think it was great. We had a lot of patients who used to take two or three medications a day. They found it very convenient to do the tap, and it helped them remember, yes, I took my medication.
”When we showed them how to use it, most of them found it easy, and it was fun. Every time they took their medication, they had fun seeing that thing light up.””
The Clinical Problem
Achieving and sustaining viral suppression in people living with HIV requires near-perfect adherence to antiretroviral therapy. Yet the barriers patients face are rarely about motivation. They are structural. Transportation challenges, food and housing insecurity, competing health priorities, and mental health burdens sit between patients and consistent treatment, and they are largely invisible to care teams until a clinical consequence surfaces.
The same dynamic plays out in HCV. Curative therapies exist, yet HCV incidence continues to rise worldwide. Access to prescribers, treatment completion, and SVR assessment rates remain unacceptably low in underserved populations and non-specialist settings. Linkage to care and retention through the full treatment course remain the defining challenges for elimination goals.
In both diseases, the gap is not the medicine. It is the infrastructure to support patients through the complexity of accessing and staying on therapy, and the visibility for care teams to know when and how to intervene.
How Synchronyx Addresses Adherence and Therapy Simplication Gaps
Smart labels attach to medication packages and record each dose at the moment of administration. Reminders arrive when a dose is due. If a dose is missed, the patient is prompted to report why. Those reported reasons, whether structural barriers, side effects, or access challenges, are captured in structured form and feed directly into the clinician or pharmacy portal.
When adherence drops below a predefined threshold or a patient reports a concerning barrier, the right care team member is alerted automatically with enough context to determine the appropriate response. In HIV, that might mean routing a patient to social work support rather than a nurse follow-up call. In HCV, it might mean a pharmacist intervention before a patient disengages from care entirely.
The result is a platform that does not just monitor adherence. It supports linkage to care by creating a continuous, real-time connection between patients and the clinical teams responsible for their outcomes.
Quality Improvement Initiative Among 4 HIV Clinics Using Remote Monitoring in ART Management and Adherence Optimization
This quality improvement initiative was conducted across four HIV clinics between July and December 2024, combining provider-focused audit-feedback sessions with patient-facing collaborative learning sessions and a real-time adherence monitoring pilot.
Healthcare professionals including patient navigators, nurses, case managers, and NPs attended structured sessions focused on creating action plans to improve adherence and developing confidence in discussing adherence with patients. People with HIV attended collaborative learning sessions centered on treatment education and care engagement.
Beginning January 2025, the clinics piloted Tappt as a real-time adherence monitoring tool. People with HIV tracked doses and completed surveys over four months. Care teams were alerted when adherence fell below 80% over a 28-day period or when specific barriers were reported.
Program participants:
90 people with HIV enrolled in the platform
51 actively participated in the pilot
Mean age 50, 52% Hispanic/Latinx, 48% Medicaid insurance coverage
50 healthcare professionals attended provider education sessions
Supported by: An independent educational grant from Gilead Sciences.
What the Program Found
Among the 51 active participants, high-adherence users achieved a mean adherence rate of 94%. Low-adherence users showed a mean rate of 36%. The majority of low-adherence users reported at least one SDOH barrier, indicating that the adherence gap in this population is driven primarily by structural factors rather than behavioral ones.
This distinction matters enormously for program design. Generic reminders do not help a patient who cannot get to a pharmacy because of transportation barriers. Real-time identification of the specific barrier does.
Reported SDOH barriers:
29% identified transportation as the primary barrier to accessing HIV care
25% identified food and housing support as a primary need
22% identified mental health support as a primary need
Provider outcomes:
Patient confidence in taking ART as prescribed increased from 67% to 91% following collaborative learning sessions
70% of healthcare professionals reported very high confidence in asking patients about ART adherence after audit-feedback sessions
55% of providers planned to implement increased ART adherence education in their practice
Effectiveness of a Novel Smart Tag Technology in a Pharmacy-Led Setting to Improve Adherence, Patient-Centered Care and Outcomes in HCV
This non-inferiority study evaluates Tappt as a digital medication companion for patients initiating daily oral HCV treatment, followed through the full course of therapy to SVR assessment. Thirty patients are enrolled, with smart labels recording real-time dose activity, scheduled surveys capturing barriers to care, social determinants of health, and patient-reported outcomes, and pharmacy team alerts triggered when adherence or outcomes suggest clinical risk.
The primary aim is to assess the non-inferior efficacy of Tappt compared to a retrospective cohort across four outcomes: overall adherence, treatment completion rates, SVR assessment rates, and SVR achievement rates. Secondary aims include characterizing patient barriers to adherence and SVR achievement and evaluating pharmacist actions in response to platform alerts.
The study is designed to demonstrate how pharmacy-led HCV care, supported by real-time digital monitoring, can streamline workflows, expand treatment access to non-specialist settings, and support national HCV elimination goals.
ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT06263829. View registration →
University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System (UI Health) Liver Clinic, Chicago, IL. Principal Investigator: Michelle T. Martin, PharmD.
Supported by: ASHP Foundation, Optimizing Technology Solution Innovation Grant.
Why This Matters
Pharma and medical affairs: The HIV program demonstrates Synchronyx's ability to generate real-world evidence on SDOH barriers at the individual patient level, in a population where structural factors drive the majority of adherence failures. For life science organizations investing in patient support programs for HIV or other infectious disease therapies, this is the kind of granular, actionable data that informs where support resources should be deployed and how to demonstrate their impact to payers and health systems. The HCV study directly addresses SVR achievement in pharmacy-led settings, which is increasingly the delivery model for HCV care at scale.
Health systems and infectious disease programs: The alert model gives care teams the context to act before low adherence becomes a clinical consequence. Identifying that a patient is missing doses because of food insecurity rather than forgetfulness changes the intervention entirely. For programs working toward the 95-95-95 targets in HIV or HCV elimination goals, Synchronyx provides the real-time infrastructure to support linkage and retention at every step of the care continuum.
Specialty pharmacy and patient services: 64% of this HIV population reported at least one SDOH barrier. For specialty pharmacies and hub programs managing infectious disease patients, Synchronyx provides structured, real-time SDOH screening embedded in the dose-tracking workflow, without adding a separate touchpoint or care team burden. The HCV study, led by a clinical pharmacist at a major academic medical center and supported by the ASHP Foundation, speaks directly to the pharmacy workforce's role in expanding infectious disease care access.
Publications and Presentations
Hightow-Weidman L, Sapir T, Molloy L, Simone L, Napolitan C, Carter J, Rodriguez M, Anderson Chadha C, Pillinger KE. Improving ART Adherence and HIV Care Engagement Through Multi-Faceted Interventions. IDWeek, October 2025. Poster #361. Abstract #2112329.
HCV Tappt Adherence Study. ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT06263829. View registration →
Synchronyx partners with health systems, pharmacies, life science organizations, and clinical research teams on patient companion programs, adherence monitoring, and real-world evidence generation.
If your program involves keeping patients on therapy and connected to care, let's talk.