The medical industry is keenly aware that being adherent to a prescription regimen will help to manage diseases and sometimes even cure a patient of his disease. Its also been known that patients aren\u2019t particularly good at taking their meds as directed.<\/p>\n
\nFor the past few years there have been studies on the adherence of patients and why they are or are not adherent.\u00a0 Only about half of the patients who have a prescription take their meds after the first month. Most of the studies that I\u2019ve seen attribute the almost 50% drop-off to the cost of the meds. There is a new study<\/a>, sponsored by the Aetena Insurance company, that has stunned the medical community, especially doctors. The findings were presented at the American Heart Association<\/a> conference in Orlando, Florida in early November, 2011. The New England Journal of Medicine published the results on-line.<\/p>\n \nIn such studies there are typically two groups, one, which is called the \u201ccontrol group.\u201d This study set out to see how levels of adherence would improve if cost were taken out of the equation for patients who have experienced a recent heart attack. Patients in the control group were given their medications using the cost structure that the patients are used to, including the insurance co-pay. Many of the rest were given their medications for free, just to see how much that would influence the adherence level.<\/p>\n \nThe results were disheartening to the authors of the study as they found that the \u201cfree meds\u201d patients were only 4 to 6 percent more adherent than the control group. They were hoping to boost the rate quite a bit.<\/p>\n \nThe good news is that health care costs actually dropped by 26% for the patients that took their meds as prescribed in the \u201cfree meds\u201d group.\u00a0 This is attributed to fewer necessary doctor visits, less necessary lab testing and fewer necessary hospitalizations. \u00a0Insurance company costs also went down for this group of cardiac patients, to an annual total of a little more than $64K. The control group cost the insurance companies about $70K. The medical industry is keenly aware that being adherent to a prescription regimen will help to manage diseases and sometimes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,13,15,17,19,20,21,24,25,26,28],"tags":[10,12,14,16,18,22,23,27],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1034"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1034\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.medtexter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nMany of us just can\u2019t remember to take our meds if left to our own memory. For those of us that take multiple meds each day, we often get a little confused. We need to be reminded to take our meds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"