Solving Treatment Adherence with Data

By Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick
Twitter: @drnic1
Host of Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist#TheIncrementalist

On this episode I talked to Andrew Mellin, MD, VP, Chief Medical Information Officer at Surescripts (@surescripts). Andrew is an Internist and Hospitalist who has spent the last 20 years focused on technology innovation in healthcare and is now working to deliver trusted information into the healthcare system and close the loop on medications.

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From the beginning of medicine, physicians have prescribed treatments and medicines and understood these were being taken by their patients but data shows that the adherence rates are far lower than one would expect with some 20-30% of patients not even filling the prescription and then a further cohort who don’t take the medication as prescribed.

We discuss the challenge for doctors who struggle to understand what medication their patients are taking especially as the care team expanded and multiple prescribers can contribute to a single patient’s treatments. They have managed to aggregate multiple sources of data and create a source of truth for the prescriptions that a patient is receiving. This is now real-time or near real-time offering a whole new level of insight to the clinical care team and the care coordinators.

Listen in to hear the discussion on addressing the failures of the healthcare system and the biggest contributor to patients’ adherence to prescribed therapy and how real-time information and better insights can help solve these problems improve outcomes, predict and preventing adverse events and increase medication adherence by as much as 60%.

About the Show
For years Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick, has served as a voice on the impact of new technologies on healthcare, earning a reputation as a leading authority on where the future of medicine is going. Combining powers of observation and real world experience, Dr. Nick has seen many predictions come true and makes the case that innovations in healthcare can be accomplished incrementally, not just by moonshot events. Tune in to hear Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist and his guests discuss what the future of healthcare looks like, how we will get there, and what it will take to improve healthcare for all.

This article was originally published on the Dr. Nick – The Incrementalist blog and is republished here with permission.