e-Prescription Abandonment Higher?

Post date: Dec 8, 2010 8:29:13 AM

I have always been surprised that e-prescribing advocates say that more prescriptions will be filled if sent directly to a pharmacy. My observations (and personal experience) showed that pharmacists complained of medications not being picked up which requires them to "return to stock" and reverse the adjudication. I've also observed (and experienced) that pharmacies are reluctant to fill an e-script because they don't know if a patient is going to pick it up. There have never been numbers but at least prescription abandonment is being talked about.

Cost of co-payment is obviously one factor:

• individuals were 8% more likely to stop therapy for every $10 increase in weekly out of pocket (OOP) expense (Gleason et al, 2009)

• prescriptions with copayments of $40 to $50 were 3.40 times more likely to be abandoned (Shrank et al, 2010)

And not unexpected (at least to me), electronic delivery of prescriptions 1.64 times more likely to be abandoned (Shrank et al, 2010).

References:

Gleason, PP, Starner, CI, Gunderson, BW, Schafer, JA & Sarran, HS 2009, 'Association of Prescription Abandonment with Cost Share for High-Cost Specialty Pharmacy Medications', Journal of Managed Care Pharmacy, Vol. 15, no. 8, pp. 648-58

King, N 2008, Overcoming Ambulatory E-Prescribing Adoption Challenges: Governments Shaping Innovation on Behalf of Individual Stakeholders, IBM Center for the Business of Government. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1334653.

Shrank, WH, Choudhry, NK, Fischer, MA, Avorn, J, Powell, M, Schneeweiss, S, Liberman, JN, Dollear, T, Brennan, TA & Brookhart, MA 2010, 'The Epidemiology of Prescriptions Abandoned at the Pharmacy', Annals of Internal Medicine, Vol. 153, no. 10, pp. 633-40.

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