Patient’s Awareness of Drug Mgmt Tools

By gantwerp on May 27, 2008 – 5:17 pm

So, I am new to the contributor’s group here on DrugSafetyHub.  You can see more about me on my daily blog - Patient Centric Healthcare.  I will bring my perspective from 5 years at Express Scripts along with the work I do at Silverlink Communications with PBMs and MCOs around the issue of patient communications.

But, one of the things that I was thinking about last week was all the technology tools and solutions that we try to bring to bear to help patients with drug awareness to drive compliance / adherence.  The industry talks a lot about personal health records, health coaches, and refill reminders.  I hadn’t seen the data until we had Liz Boehm from Forrester present at our client event last week.  She showed some interesting statistics from their Q2 2007 Social Technographics online survey.

  • 51% of people had never even heard of a personal health record
  • Only 3% of people had ever gotten a text message about refills or compliance for their medication…and if you look a a slightly more traditional channel like e-mail, that number only goes up to 9%
  • Only 18% had ever used a drug cost comparison tool AND of those that used them only 34% felt reassured in their decision based on the tool

Perhaps even scarier was the fact that their data showed that only 8% of people believed they were being non-adherent.  What about the 30% of people that never even get the first fill?

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Posted in Adherence, PBM, Technology |

2 Comments to “Patient’s Awareness of Drug Mgmt Tools”

  1. Additional Blog Site « Patient Centric Healthcare Says:
    May 27th, 2008 at 5:19 pm

    […] 2008 by George Van Antwerp I got asked to contribute to the Drug Safety Hub Blog and just posted my first entry there on patient’s awareness of technology solutions around […]

  2. Alex Sicre Says:
    May 29th, 2008 at 3:37 pm

    George:

    I am not surprised by the PHR numbers, as every time I mention it, non-industry friends ask what it is - however awareness should rise with Google in the game. With text reminders, I am only aware of a handful of companies besides Intelecare that offer these services - and they do not all work. Does this include systems like NexDose pagers as well?

    With pharmacy driven email reminders, the retailers do not let their customers know about these services at the point of fill. You really have to seek them out online and sometimes they do not work. I think the Wilson Rx Satisfaction Study supports these reminder numbers as well.

    Really surprised by only 8% of people thinking they are non-adherent. The 2007 NPCPA poll put that number at 36%, with 74% admitting to actually being non-adherent. What was Forrester’s survey group? I looked for the report on their site, but wasn’t sure which one has the stats you refer to in this blog.

    I used a cost comparison tool last October, but it wasn’t until one of my medications was off my formulary that I switched to the generic as the price of the brand rose 200%, and my MD said it was basically the same.

    We recently did a survey about health benefit tools utilization that you might find interesting. I will email to you when it is complete.

    Best,
    Alex

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