Portland, ME. – In a recently released research paper published by medication adherence company, HealthPrize Technologies and consulting company Capgemini, pharmaceutical companies are losing $637 billion in revenue annually to non-adherence – with a common problem in people with chronic conditions.
For insurers, employers, and patients, non-adherence significantly increases healthcare costs as a result of disease-related complications,” the authors wrote. “For pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies, and pharmacy benefits managers, non-adherence significantly erodes profit due to prescriptions never filled and medications not taken often enough … non-adherence is also to blame for immense personal and societal costs beyond the financial, in the form of poor health outcomes, untimely death, lost productivity, and compromised quality of life.
As an example of non-persistence, the report by HealthPrize goes into detail regarding people on statin therapy. With a population group of over 400,000 patients followed for 2.5 years in the UK, 47% discontinued therapy and 72% of that group restarted during the same time period. But why the stop and restart?
Many tools have been released to help curb the non-adherence challenge. Apps such as MangoHealth, MyMedSchedule and Pill Reminder by Drugs.comare free tools to help patients increase adherence. In addition, and as written previously on HXP, Adheretech created a smart wireless pill bottle that collects and sends data to health care providers. When doses are missed, patients and caregivers can receive custom reminders and alerts to help keep adherence in check.
You can read the full report from HealthPrize and Capgemini here.
Why This Matters –
Non-adherence challenges are not new to pharmaceutical and/or marketing teams. What is alarming is the jump and unhealthy growth (albeit revenue – read: Pharma drug prices) in loss overall. While we are seeing a shift in patient centricity within pharmaceutical companies, there is still a lot of work to do to help educate and develop meaningful key messages that reach the patient level and in turn creates enough moxie to react. It will be interesting to see how this research helps paint a clearer picture of where marketers need to spend dollars and cents to help increase adherence.
