Improving Medication Adherence

Managed Healthcare Executive E-News
October 15, 2010

The New England Healthcare Institute (NEHI) is calling for a national strategy to examine the role care teams can have on improving patient adherence to prescription medicines. Given the shortage of primary care physicians and escalating health care costs, care teams may be useful to better medication adherence, but more research is needed on how to best deploy them in a wide variety of practice settings, according to a NEHI report titled "Medication Adherence and Care Teams: A Call for Demonstration Projects."...

"Going back several year with incremental shifting of higher costs to individual subscribers for folks with employer-sponsored health insurance, we see the more expensive healthcare became, the more negative impact there was on medication adherence," says Tom Hubbard, senior program director at NEHI. "Continuing research shows that, indeed, in many instances raising costs has a fairly immediate effect in driving down compliance. That has also spawned value-based insurance design (VBID), which tries to build in lower costs for highly valuable services, including medications."

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