Consider the impact of poor medication adherence
Impact to insurance costs – Corporate health insurance premiums continue to rise year-over-year with 28 percent of large employers ranking escalating costs for pharmacy benefits as a top 10 challenge to maintaining affordable benefit coverage.
Source: Towers Watson and National Business Group on Health, Shaping Healthcare Strategy in a Post-Reform Environment: 16th Annual Employer Survey on Purchasing Value in Health Care Report, 2011
Compliance key to workforce health – When asked to rate the importance of a variety of workforce health management objectives, 89 percent of employers in a recent survey of large employers rated medication compliance 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale of importance. Only preventive care (97 percent) and lifestyle behaviors (91 percent) were rated more highly.
Source: Employee Benefit News, The Benfield Group Study conducted on behalf of the National Pharmaceutical Council, Chuck Reynolds and Laura Rudder, September 2010
Unfilled prescriptions and missed doses – Studies conducted to analyze the underlying reasons for poor medication adherence show that 1 out of 4 people never fill initial prescriptions. Patients with chronic diseases like diabetes and coronary artery disease, adhere to their ongoing medication regimen only about half the time. Nonadherence to essential medications is a frequent cause of preventable hospitalizations and patient illness, with costs to the U.S. healthcare system estimated at about $300 billion annually.
Source: New England Healthcare Institute, Thinking Outside the Pillbox: A System-wide Approach to Improving Patient Medication Adherence for Chronic Disease, August 2009
America’s other drug problem – According to the National Council on Patient Information and Education, poor medicine adherence has reached crisis proportions in the U.S., leading to unnecessary disease progression, disease complications, reduced functional abilities, and a lower quality of life. In a study published by NCPIE, more than half of Americans (54 percent) do not always take their prescribed medicine as directed resulting in approximately $177 billion annually in direct and indirect costs to the U.S. economy. The seriousness of this problem prompted NCPIE to term nonadherence as “America’s other drug problem."
Source: National Council on Patient Information and Education, Enhancing Prescription Medicine Adherence: A National Action Plan, August 2007
Reasons why patients choose not to comply with medication treatments
A study of 10,000 patients conducted by Harris Interactive and Boston Consulting Group found that forgetting to take medications is not the primary driver of nonadherence. Instead, the vast majority of surveyed patients were actively choosing whether to take medicine as directed. Reasons cited by patients were:
- 24% Sometimes forget to use or refill
- 20% Don’t want the side effects
- 17% Drugs costs too much
- 14% Don’t think I need the drug
- 10% Can’t get prescription filled, picked up, or delivered
- 1% Don’t know how to use the drug
