Provided by The Pharmacy Chick
I found it interesting when I was reading the paper yesterday and buried in the middle was the results of a study done ( by Aetna) that wanted to see if patient compliance would improve if drugs were offered to the patients FREE.
Two groups were compared, one that had their drugs provided free of charge and the second,which had a copay. One might think that it would be a slam dunk conclusion: Free drugs would drastically improve compliance.
If you think that, you would be wrong.
http://online.wsj.com/article/APf4499fb7e9cf4b26b1ac16d5ee2a876a.html
Apparently even Free isn’t a good enough price. Copied from the original article:
The study enrolled 5,855 Aetna members who had a drug plan as part of their benefits and were going home from the hospital after a heart attack. They were 53 years old on average, and three-fourths were men.
The researchers had hoped to recruit 7,500 patients but scaled back when so few signed on.
Preventive medicines were offered free to 2,845 patients and prescribed with the usual copayments for the rest. Copays for these drugs run around $50 a month.
Roughly a year later, the share of patients who filled their prescriptions ranged from 36 percent to 49 percent in the copay group, depending on the drug, and was only 4 to 6 percentage points higher in the group that had no copays.
Providing these medicines for free had a “distressingly modest” effect on patients’ willingness to take them, Dr. Lee Goldman of Columbia University and Dr. Arnold Epstein of the Harvard School of Public Health wrote in an editorial in the medical journal.
Comments?? Tell me what you think about this study, and why you think it turned out the way it did!
The Pharmacy Chick is a retail pharmacist in the Western United States, gutting it out in fairly busy store. She ticks off each day as one more day closer to retirement, after 22 years in the biz. She remembers typewriters, rolls of labels, want books, and everybody paid cash. Now all she wants to remember is what all her passwords are!
The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.
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