{"doi":"10.1093/aje/kwac006","title":"One Pill, Once a Day: Simplified Treatment Regimens and Retention in HIV Care","abstract":"Simplified drug regimens may improve retention in care for persons with chronic diseases. In April 2013, South Africa adopted a once-daily single-pill human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) treatment regimen as the standard of care, replacing a multiple-pill regimen. Because the regimens had similar biological efficacy, the shift to single-pill therapy offered a real-world test of the impact of simplified drug-delivery mechanisms on patient behavior. Using a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity design, we assessed retention in care among patients starting HIV treatment just before and just after the guideline change. The study included 4,484 patients starting treatment at a large public sector clinic in Johannesburg, South Africa. The share of patients prescribed a single-pill regimen increased by over 40 percentage points between March and April 2013. Initiating treatment after the policy change was associated with 11.7-percentage-points' higher retention at 12 months (95% confidence interval: -2.2, 29.4). Findings were robust to different measures of retention, different bandwidths, and different statistical models. Patients starting treatment early in HIV infection-a key population in the test-and-treat era-experienced the greatest improvements in retention from single-pill regimens.","journal":"American Journal of Epidemiology","year":2022,"id":273579,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":10,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9508,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":941068,"name":"Sheryl A. Kluberg","orcid":"0000-0003-2846-7879","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":267434,"name":"Michael P. LaValley","orcid":"0000-0002-8488-5170","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":593209,"name":"Denise Evans","orcid":"0000-0003-0698-1228","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":941069,"name":"Kamban Hirasen","orcid":"0000-0001-9531-9230","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":363993,"name":"Mhairi Maskew","orcid":"0000-0003-4238-0200","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":415442,"name":"Lawrence Long","orcid":"0000-0003-4986-4988","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":87357,"name":"Matthew P. Fox","orcid":"0000-0001-9887-0634","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":231224,"name":"Jacob Bor","orcid":"0000-0002-5112-8536","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":54,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:28:03.504676Z","pmid":"35081613","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}