In global healthcare, the gap between knowledge and action can cost lives. Patients who don't take their medication consistently — a problem called medication non-adherence — account for an estimated 50% of treatment failures worldwide. But measuring why patients don't adhere is surprisingly hard.
The tools that exist for measuring medication adherence were largely developed in high-income countries like the US, UK, and Europe. They ask about costs, insurance, and pharmacy access — all relevant in Boston, but less so in Bandung, Lagos, or Dhaka. The socioeconomic, cultural, and healthcare system realities of Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) are fundamentally different.
The Faculty of Pharmacy at Universitas Padjadjaran had spent years studying this gap — and building a solution. The result was UMAS: the UNPAD Medication Adherence Scale, the first psychometrically validated instrument designed specifically for the LMIC context. They came to us with one question: how do we make this accessible to researchers around the world?
What the Researchers Needed
UMAS is an academic instrument. Its primary audience is healthcare researchers, pharmacists, and public health professionals working in developing countries. For this audience, credibility is everything. The platform needed to:
- Communicate the scientific rigor behind the scale
- Make it easy for researchers to request access to the instrument
- Serve as an ongoing reference for citations and published studies
- Work reliably from any country, on any device
This is not a SaaS product. There's no sign-up flow to optimise, no DAU metric to chase. Success is measured in researchers reached, studies enabled, and ultimately — patients helped.
The Four Domains
One of the most important design decisions was how to communicate the instrument's multidimensional framework. UMAS measures adherence across four evidence-based domains:
Domain I — Patient Factors: Cognitive and behavioral barriers including health beliefs, memory issues, self-efficacy, and intentional non-adherence. This is where most existing scales stop.
Domain II — Medical Factors: Therapy-related obstacles such as side effects, regimen complexity, drug interactions, and treatment duration.
Domain III — Healthcare Facility: System-level barriers including drug availability, quality of patient counseling, provider relationships, and facility access — particularly relevant in settings where these vary significantly.
Domain IV — Socioeconomic Factors: The LMIC-specific layer — financial access, insurance coverage, family support systems, and cultural factors that influence whether a patient fills their prescription or not.
Visualising these four domains clearly was central to communicating what makes UMAS different from every other adherence scale. We used a clean, card-based layout that lets researchers quickly grasp the breadth of what the instrument measures.
What We Built
We built the UMAS platform using Next.js — chosen for its performance, SEO capabilities, and flexibility. For an academic audience, search visibility matters: a researcher in Ghana looking for "medication adherence scale LMIC" should be able to find this platform.
The platform has three core sections:
Home: Introduces UMAS, its purpose, its validated status, and its four domains. Designed to answer "what is this and why does it matter" within the first 30 seconds.
Request Scale: A simple, low-friction process for researchers to request access to the full instrument. Open access was a deliberate choice — the researchers at UNPAD wanted zero barrier between a researcher and the tool they need.
Research & Citations: A curated list of published studies using UMAS, giving the instrument a living record of its impact and giving potential users confidence in its scientific standing.
What We Learned
Building for academia is different from building for business. The success metric isn't conversion rate — it's trust. Every design decision had to reinforce the credibility of the instrument and its authors.
We also learned that "open access" is a design decision, not just a business model. The platform needed to feel accessible — unintimidating, clear, and functional regardless of the connection quality or device a researcher in a resource-limited setting might be using.
Finally, this project was a reminder that technology's highest-leverage applications are often not in startups or enterprise — they're in the spaces where the right tool, in the right hands, can change how a disease is understood and treated across an entire region of the world.
The Outcome
UMAS is now available to healthcare researchers globally — open access, no paywall, no friction. The platform gives the instrument the digital presence it deserves, and the Faculty of Pharmacy at Universitas Padjadjaran a permanent, professional home for their work.
The scale itself — 41+ items, four validated domains — is the first of its kind for LMIC settings. The platform we built is what makes it findable, accessible, and credible to the researchers who need it most.