Pharmacy-based interventions to reduce primary medication nonadherence to cardiovascular medications.

BACKGROUND Primary medication nonadherence (PMN) occurs when patients do not fill new prescriptions. Interventions to reduce PMN have not been well described. OBJECTIVES To determine whether 2 pharmacy-based interventions could decrease PMN. DESIGN Two sequential interventions with a control group were evaluated after completion. The automated intervention began in 2007 and consisted of phone calls to patients on the third and seventh days after a prescription was processed but remained unpurchased. The live intervention began in 2009 and used calls from a pharmacist or technician to patients who still had not picked up their prescriptions after 8 days. SUBJECTS Patients with newly prescribed cardiovascular medications received at CVS community pharmacies. Patients with randomly selected birthdays served as the control population. MEASURES Patient abandonment of new prescription, defined as not picking up medications within 30 days of initial processing at the pharmacy. RESULTS The automated intervention included 852,612 patients and 1.2 million prescriptions, with a control group of 9282 patients and 13,178 prescriptions. The live intervention included 121,155 patients and 139,502 prescriptions with a control group of 2976 patients and 3407 prescriptions. The groups were balanced by age, sex, and patterns of prior prescription use. For the automated intervention, 4.2% of prescriptions were abandoned in the intervention group and 4.5% in the control group (P>0.1), with no significant differences for any individual classes of medications. The live intervention was used in a group that had not purchased prescriptions after 8 days and thus had much higher PMN. In this setting 36.9% of prescriptions were abandoned in the intervention group and 41.7% in the control group, a difference of 4.8% (P<0.0001). The difference in abandoned prescriptions for antihypertensives was 6.9% (P<0.0001) but for antihyperlipidemics was only 1.4% (P>0.1). CONCLUSIONS Automated reminder calls had no effect on PMN. Live calls from pharmacists decreased antihypertensive PMN significantly, although many patients still abandoned their prescriptions.