Non-adherence: A New Way to Measure

Non-adherence: A New Way to Measure

A new study examines drug adherence in an interesting way by looking at the rate of prescriptions abandoned at the pharmacy. Traditional non-adherence studies have looked at refill rates, pill counting, and patient reports of medication use. But prescriptions abandoned at the pharmacy represent a potential opportunity to intervene and improve adherence at the very onset of the prescribing process.

Researchers used the CVS pharmacy database to evaluate more than 10 million prescriptions filled by more than 5 million patients. The overall abandonment rate was 3.27%, although nearly half of those were eventually filled by the same drug or a similar drug within 30 days. Not surprisingly, patients were least likely to abandon opiate prescriptions, and were most likely to abandon expensive prescriptions. Prescriptions with a copayment of $40-$50 and those with a copayment of more than $50 were 3.4 times and 4.68 times more likely to be abandoned, respectively, than prescriptions with no copayment (P < 0.001 for both comparisons). New users of medications were more likely to abandon prescriptions than prevalent users, and prescriptions that were delivered to the pharmacy electronically were 1.64 times more likely to be abandoned than those that were not electronic (P < 0.001); however, they were unable to determine whether written prescriptions were never delivered to the pharmacy by patients.

The authors concluded that prescription abandonment represents an important opportunity to intervene and improve adherence (Ann Intern Med 2010;153:633-640). An accompanying editorial points out that the rate of abandonment in this study was actually quite low. Others studies have suggested that 17%-20% of patients do not pick up new prescriptions, and 8% of patients' prescriptions are denied by health plans. Physicians and pharmacists are urged to remain mindful that costs are an important barrier to adherence and that lower cost alternatives should be prescribed "whenever feasible" (Ann Intern Med 2010;153:680-681).