When a patient leaves an office with a prescription for a statin, anti-hypertensive or diabetes medication, how do clinicians know if the patient is taking the medication as directed? The NEMG Medication Adherence Program (NMAP) is tackling this challenging issue through direct patient outreach.
Research clearly indicates that patients achieve better outcomes and a lower cost of care when they take medications prescribed to manage chronic conditions. The NMAP involves NEMG nurses across adult primary care sites, who receive patient-level reports based on pharmacy claims data. The reports use refill history to indicate which patients are categorized as high risk of non-adherence.
Nurses perform chart review, investigate the situation with pharmacists, clinicians and other team members to understand why this might be occurring and contact the patient if necessary. These investigations have discovered multiple scenarios to explain the reported non-adherence and other concerns, including a patient taking expired samples, a patient taking his wife’s medication and a patient nearly taking a double dose of statins due to a communication breakdown. The NMAP has demonstrated how NEMG nurses, as members of our clinical teams, are helping to keep our patients safe and attain better outcomes.
