How Can You Help the Medicine Go Down?

The Wall Street Journal
March 28, 2011

Medication can do great things for people—but only if they take it. And a lot of people aren't taking it.

Half of patients in the developed world don't properly take their drugs for chronic conditions, according to the World Health Organization. The additional costs for treating diseases that progress unchecked run into the hundreds of billions of dollars a year. One study estimates nearly 90,000 people die prematurely in the U.S. each year because of poor adherence to high-blood-pressure treatment alone...

The technology to fix that problem exists, says Valerie Fleishman, executive director of NEHI, a national health-policy research institute based in Cambridge, Mass. "Physicians are sending prescriptions to the pharmacy, so we have the capability to close that feedback loop," she says. The problem, she says, is that most doctors are paid for specific services, like office visits and medical procedures—not for managing their patients' health outcomes. So there is no financial incentive for them to take on the cost of tracking prescription refills.

There is no quick fix for this problem, Ms. Fleishman says, but the recently passed health-care overhaul bill includes funding for new models for care and payment that might do a better job of rewarding providers for doing whatever it takes to keep patients healthy...

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