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?