Improve Adherence to Health Tech. Solutions
The Adherence Canvas is a tool to guide and measure the consideration of adherence to improve it during the design and development of medical technology.
Up to 50% of patients don't adhere to medical technology especially when self-administrated. The Adherence Canvas aids in the improvement of adherence consideration during the design process.

About the Adherence Canvas
The Adherence Canvas is a tool to guide and measure adherence factors during the design of health technology. The Canvas is based on an adherence framework that focuses on patient-administered medical technology. Improving adherence factors improves patient adherence to the medical regimen.
The Adherence Canvas is part of Rafiq Elmansy’s PhD research at the School of Design, Northumbria University. The PhD researched the Role of Design Thinking in Improving Adherence in Self-Administered Treatment Technology in 2021. The research is supervised by Dr Stuart English (1st supervisor) and Prof Gilbert Cockton (2nd supervisor).
How Does it Work?
Why You Need It?
Adherence is one of the critical factors in the medical practice for patients, clinicians and the healthcare system. The impact of poor adherence becomes exacerbated when the treatment is patient-administered and in chronic diseases.
Poor adherence blurs the medical intervention’s effectiveness resulting in patient condition deterioration and losses for the healthcare system.
Poor adherence causes a reduction in intervention’s efficacy in the evaluation and clinical trials.
Good adherence positively affects patient’s medical condition and empowers patients to self-administer their treatments.
Good adherence drives market success and patient trust in the intervention.
1
Guide
Don’t know how to drive patients to adhere to your product usage? The general Adherence Canvas can guide you through general factors of adherence.
2
Measure
Ensure that adherence is considered in your product planning phase. Measure how each factor is considered in the medical product or service.
3
Evaluate
Do not let your product fail evaluation procedures (or clinical trials) because patients didn’t use the product. Evaluate how adherence is considered before testing the product.
What Experts Say..
Get in Touch!
Book Your Online consultation session.
- Would you like to learn more about the Adherence Canvas?
- Would you like to try the Adherence Canvas?
- Are you interested in collaborating in our adherence research?
- Do you have any comments or feedback?
- Drop me a message using the form to the right.
The Adherence Canvas is based on Rafiq Elmansy’s research which was proudly conducted at the School of Design, Northumbria University.

Our Research Collaborators







Patient Empowerment Ambassadors

Dr Stuart English, FRSA
Associate Professor (PhD research supervisor)
School of Design, Northumbria University

Stephen Tooke
co-founder, Tookie Limited
(A Life More Normal)

Dr Alex Cole, Head Of Strategic Marketing, CPI

Charlotte Gordon
Senior Lecturer – Adult Nursing
Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, Northumbria University

Dr Giana Carli Lorenzini
Researcher, Dept of Design Sciences,
Lund University Sweden

David Kuraguntla
Co-founder and CEO of Alio

Dr Rafiq Elmansy, PhD, MA, BSc, FHEA, FRSA
Author, lecturer and researcher
School of Design, Northumbria University