Branded

For decades, the pharmacy profession labored under a widespread, but inaccurate, public perception of pharmacists as little more than dispensers of prescription medicines and givers of basic counseling on their use. No more. Pharmacists today are highly trained, clinically engaged patient-care specialists making a huge and rapidly growing impact on population health management in communities all over America.

The future of American health care could be summed up in one word — “connection.” To thrive in a fast-reforming healthcare system that demands better patient outcomes at a lower cost, pharmacies, physicians, hospitals, health systems, outpatient clinicians and diagnosticians are going to have to connect much more effectively, both with one another and with the patients they serve.

With medication nonadherence leading to enormous health complications for millions of Americans — and generating staggering and needless cost spikes that add as much as $290 billion a year to the nation’s healthcare costs — the search for ways to get patients to take their prescription medicines as directed has become increasingly urgent.

Here’s a fact that keeps health plan administrators and anyone else responsible for budgeting health costs awake at night: 1-in-5 hospital patients ends up back in the hospital within 30 days of their discharge. And the biggest factors pulling them back all have to do with medications — either through medication errors, nonadherence or adverse drug events.