NCPIE: Accelerating Progress in Prescription Medicine Adherence: The Adherence Action Agenda

Lack of prescription medicine adherence can be considered America’s “other drug problem,” leading to unnecessary disease progression, disease complications, reduced functional abilities, a lower quality of life, and even possibly premature death. Such downstream effects also increasingly contribute to our overall national health expenditures. That is why in 2007, the National Council on Patient Information and Education (NCPIE) issued Enhancing Prescription Medicine Adherence: A National Action Plan. Calling for a national mobilization to reduce adverse health and economic consequences associated with this pervasive public health threat, the report documented the numerous behavioral, social, economic, medical and policy-related factors that contribute to patients not taking their medicines as prescribed and released a ten-step blueprint for action across the continuum of care- from diagnosis through treatment, and follow-up patient care and monitoring. Read more >>

Source: NCPIE’s BeMedicineSmart.org

P4HA visits North Carolina-Take Your Meds: Strategies for Adherence

Prescriptions for a Healthy America and Council for Affordable Health Coverage President, Joel White, visits North Carolina to join a panel sponsored by the NC Alliance for Healthy Communities and discuss what the state can do to promote medication adherence. He is quoted in the North Carolina Health News article below:

Take Your Meds: Strategies for Adherence

By Rose Hoban, North Carolina Health News

One of the most vexing problems for physicians is getting patients to take their medications. But in an era where payment is tied to how patients actually fare as a result of seeing the doctor, now health care practitioners have more of a stake in figuring out how to get patients to take their pills on a regular basis…Now instead of placing all of the responsibility on patients to “comply,” health care experts talk about finding strategies to help patients “adhere” to their medication regimens.

“We did a poll of about 800 consumers back in may, and two-thirds of respondents said they were not adherence to their medications over the previous month,” said Joel White of the Washington, D.C.-based Council for Affordable Health Coverage.

“That means bad things happen in terms of health, hospitalizations, disease progression and, at the extreme end, death,” he said. “On the cost side, if you have a patient who’s not taking his heart medication and he has a heart attack and ends up in the hospital, he’s just cost the health care system $70,000 or $80,000 associated with that admission.”

White said his organization has crunched the numbers: People not taking their medications costs the health care system upwards of $300 billion in avoidable costs per year, some $100 billion of that in the form of hospitalization related to medication non-adherence or adverse reactions because patients were not taking medications correctly. Read more here>>

Source North Carolina Health News