It’s incredibly important to the future of your healthcare and that of the nations. Nonadherence is the level of failure to take your medications. Adherence is the opposite. Its’ so important to your health that companies are studying what you take, why you take it, when you take it, and why you might not be taking it.

There is a school of thought (and study) that says that people don’t take their meds mostly due to cost. And becomes more problematic and the economy becomes an ever greater concern.  For some individuals it is about the costs involved. Some try to impose cash rewards for taking your meds as reported in MedCity News. But it’s so much bigger than just the cost of your meds.

It’s also about you and how you navigate in the world of jobs, your credit, what else you buy and if you are a generally dependable person. One day it may even be about whether you will be given a loan to buy a house or a car. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company that created FICO credit scores has instituted a score that tracks your adherence.  No one outside of that company knows exactly how they might use the info in the future. They might not even know themselves.

It’s probably an accurate notion that people that stick with a program are more dependable. Whether it’s a job or a payment plan or a health or medication plan.  They want to know who they’re dealing with. “If we give you this medicine are you likely to follow through?” they are asking. But they’re not really asking you… they’re checking your score instead. It’s such an overwhelming economic issue for their companies that they have to cut to the meat of the matter as quickly as possible and move on.

This whole subject reminds me of when my schoolteachers used to tell me, and my classmates, that  “this is going on your permanent record.” At first, as kids, we believed it. As we grew older we reasoned that they said things like that because they wanted to sound more Godlike. There is no permanent record, we reasoned. Oops. I guess we were wrong.  There is a permanent record.

Here is the big question for the future: If you don’t have a good adherence score, will they even bother to treat you at all?