Medication Adherence – What Data is Available to Provide Insight into Non-Compliance?
By IntrinsiQ Specialty Solutions
When medications are not taken or refilled, pharmaceutical manufacturers are losing out on millions in revenue. But having poor compliance affects more than the drug companies. Patients are at risk to end up sicker or complicating their disease treatment, driving up hospitalizations or more extensive treatments. Poor adherence to medication leads to increased morbidity and death and is estimated to incur costs of approximately $100 billion per year.1 Often times, patients do not refill or take their prescriptions because there are financial concerns, a lack of health literacy or the patients feel they don’t want to deal with the side effects.
While getting prescription claims data, pharmaceutical companies can see when a particular drug is not getting refilled, but they will not get insight into the “whys.” With data from a practice’s EMR, the manufacturer can pinpoint which patients are prescribed their drug (without any identifying patient information), look to see if there are records which show concomitant conditions or therapies, variances in treatment plans, and other information from the doctor’s notes. That information is not available through the claims data, and could otherwise only be found out when having face-to-face meetings with the physicians, but even that would not offer accurate evidence but anecdotal information.
Pharma teams can use that information to create patient or provider education, or interventional tools to remind patients to take their medications. Currently, IntrinsiQ Specialty Solutions is able to take data from the practice EMR, de-identify patient information and pull reports on dozens of different data points. The data can answer the questions:
- Who is prescribing our drug?
- Is the patient receiving other therapies along with our drug?
- What is the patient’s site of care and how is it impacting access or adherence?
- What are the reasons for drop-off?
The more manufacturers are able to drill down into the data, to not just know whether the drug is being used, but to know how it is being used, the easier it will be to impact overall strategy, decision-making, messaging and troubleshooting efforts.
- 1 Osterberg L, Blaschke T..N Engl J Med.2005;():487-497
