Washington Business Journal: The Simple Way MedStar Just Found To Get Patients To Keep Up With Their Meds

By: Sloane Salzburg, Medpage Today, 3/15/18

t's the $300 billion healthcare crisis you've never heard of: medication nonadherence. This occurs when a patient fails to take a medication according to the prescribed dosage, time, frequency, and direction. The reasons for nonadherence are myriad, but at the end of the day, it is an entirely preventable problem with deadly consequences.

Poor medication adherence claims an estimated 125,000 lives a year. To put those numbers in perspective, that is nearly three times the number of fatalities attributed to the opioid epidemic in 2016 – all for a health crisis that receives a fraction of those resources or attention.

While Washington has too often dithered on real solutions to incentivize proper medication use, innovators throughout the rest of the country are finding what works -- and, finally, there are signs that lawmakers are taking notice.

At Prescriptions for a Healthy America, where I serve as Executive Director, there are three specific private-sector breakthroughs we believe that Congress and the administration should look to duplicate right away...read more here>>

mHealthIntelligence: mHealth Messages Get High Grades in Medication Adherence Study

By: Sloane Salzburg, The Hill, 9/8/17

If the news stories are to be believed, Congress cannot agree on much of anything when it comes to health care. The botched effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act made for big headlines and appeared to leave lawmakers and the public with little hope for acts of bipartisanship anytime soon.

But that narrative tells half the story. In truth, Republicans and Democrats successfully worked together just last month, when Congress overwhelmingly passed sweeping, long-term legislation to reauthorize user fee agreements that account for much of the Food & Drug Administration’s (FDA) funding.

Congress would prove the naysayers wrong last year, too, when it passed the 21st Century Cures Act, legislation signed into law by then-President Obama streamlining drug approval processes and bolstering research for breakthrough treatments and therapies.

Democrats and Republicans alike know that Washington needs another bipartisan victory of this sort, and the answer is right under their nose.

Medication adherence – the practice of ensuring patients take their drugs as prescribed – isn’t exactly the hot topic du jour in today’s health care debate. You won’t hear it mentioned in campaign commercials, and it doesn’t make for the best fundraising pitch. After all, everyone agrees people should stick to their meds, right? Read More >>