Improving outpatient primary medication adherence with physician guided, automated dispensing

Abstract

Background

Physician dispensing, different from pharmacist dispensing, is a way for practitioners to supply their patients with medications, at the point of care. The InstyMeds dispenser and logistics system can automate much of the dispensing, insurance adjudication, inventory management, and regulatory reporting that is required of physician dispensing.

Objective

To understand the percentage of patients that exhibit primary adherence to medication in the outpatient setting when choosing InstyMeds.

Method

The InstyMeds dispensing database was de-identified and analyzed for primary adherence. This is the ratio of patients who dispensed their medication to those who received an eligible prescription.

Results

The average InstyMeds emergency department installation has a primary adherence rate of 91.7%. The maximum rate for an installed device was 98.5%.

Conclusion

Although national rates of primary adherence have been found to be in the range of 70%, automated physician dispensing vastly improves the rate of adherence. Improved adherence should lead to better patient outcomes, fewer return visits, and lower healthcare costs.

Keywords:

• automated dispensing
• adherence
• compliance
• medication
• physician dispensing
• InstyMeds

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Brad Schraut for the tremendous support and the time taken to discuss the scale and scope of medication nonadherence. The author thanks Pratik Khetiya for helping to de-identify patient and customer data and for verifying the validity of database queries.

Disclosure

The author reports no conflicts of interest in this work.