Non-adherence: pharma’s final financial frontier
No other industry would tolerate avoidable annual losses of $637 billion, but that’s exactly what pharma is doing by not investing in adherence. Now is the time to start recovering that revenue, according to a new report published by Credit Suisse. pharmaphorum spoke to Tom Kottler of HealthPrize Technologies about this issue and what actions to take in Deep Dive: Patient Centricity II.
The Credit Suisse report, ‘What if patients actually took their drugs: Assessing an underappreciated opportunity’, published in March 2018, asks a simple question and returns some shocking answers.
Up to 30% of prescriptions are never filled and as many as 50% of people with long-term conditions stop taking their medications within the first year.
While the industry knows non-adherence is a big issue, it may not realise that the costs run into the hundreds of billions. The industry is largely unaware of the huge financial cost, the report argues, highlighting a ‘thorough analysis’ by Capgemini and digital health company HealthPrize Technologies. It found the industry loses $637 billion every year to medication non-adherence.
Kottler, CEO and co-founder of HealthPrize, says he has been surprised by the industry’s apparent ignorance of the figures.
When his company first started looking into the issue, the common assumption was that non-adherence cost the industry $30 billion a year. HealthPrize’s first analysis with Capgemini, in 2012, found the figure to be closer to $600 billion and this latest investigation shows that the problem has escalated.
“There is no other industry in the world that, if it had a $637 billion annual last-mile problem, would not be throwing everything it had at recovering as much of that lost revenue as possible. This is a major business challenge,” he states, arguing that it needs to be tackled at a corporate, rather than brand, level.
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