What if there was a way to significantly improve health outcomes, reduce hospital and nursing home admissions, and save $105 billion in health spending? There is one such compelling opportunity: a greater systemic focus on medication adherence. When health care professionals use the term “medication adherence,” what we’re really referencing is whether or not patients take their medicines as prescribed. Shockingly, about half the time, they don’t. And the consequences of non-adherence are great.
How Pharmacists Can Help Ensure That Patients Take Their Medicines
What if there was a way to significantly improve health outcomes, reduce hospital and nursing home admissions, and save $105 billion in health spending? There is one such compelling opportunity: a greater systemic focus on medication adherence. When health care professionals use the term “medication adherence,” what they’re really referencing is whether or not patients take their medicines as prescribed. Shockingly, about half the time, patients don’t. And the consequences of non-adherence are great. Medicare and Medicaid patients with multiple chronic conditions who tend to take multiple medications account for a disproportionate share of all health spending in America. Recognizing the important opportunity to improve the care for such patients, CareMore Health, a division of Anthem, Inc. that serves Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, launched a program. It was designed to leverage the clinical expertise of pharmacists to identify the root causes of non-adherence and hyper-personalize solutions to better support the patients we serve. Its discovery: The reasons patients don’t take medicines vary significantly; consequently, to improve adherence, you have to customize the solution for each individual. This is a significant departure from past efforts to improve adherence, which have tried to apply a single solution across a whole population.