Source: Harvard Business Review, January 31, 2019
By Humaira Ameer* & Sachin H. Jain*
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.
One of the leading studies of
the topic found that “approximately 125,000 deaths per year in the United States are due to medication non-adherence.” No
wonder, then, the World Health Organization (WHO) has determined that “increasing the effectiveness of adherence
interventions may have a far greater impact on the health of the population
than any improvement in specific medical treatments.”
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.
Our 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.
