Patients not adhering to their medication regimens has been shown in multiple studies to yield sub-optimal health outcomes as well as decreased sales opportunities for pharmaceutical companies. Various CRM efforts over the years have tried to address this. Now a new tool may be avaialable.
There was a fascinating article in the NY Times Health Blog recently about Fair Isaac (FICO)creating a logistic regression style "medication adherence score" much like their credit score, that predicts likelihood to adhere based on demographic, financial, and transactional variables. For example: Are sixty-something
middle class Midwestern grandparents with low net worth particularly non-adherent?
If a score comes up as such, would a pharmaceutical company target them with a an extra adherence mailer, kit, or a premium adherence pill bottle? Or call center support? Since these are expensive resources, targeting using a validated model score seems attractive.
Of course, these resources could be offered to anyone, but could be promoted selectively.
I think likely the modeling score was validated on historical data. It will be fascinating to see how accuracy is tracked moving forward. Also, whether pharmaceutical firms or communications agencies will adopt it.
Ira, definitely many questions exist with the idea of predicting adherance. You posed a question regarding what a pharmaceutical company may do to target the patients whom the model predicts will be less adherent. I wonder if the MCOs will want to pay for medication for the patients knowing the patients will most likely not take it. Life saving drugs will probably not see much scrutiny but life style drugs may see some qualifiers initiated by MCOs to ensure that patients are indeed taking their medication. This isn't all bad since it might lead to measurable positive outcomes for the diseases or ailments being treated. For Pharma it could be problematic since most drugs currently only show improvement over placebo and not other medications. This may warrant head to head studies which are costly and could eliminate the need for many me-to drugs on the market. Great blog and hope you continue to find the time to post. VS
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