If you’re looking for ways to optimize patient medication use, you may find yourself wondering: Can pharmacy interventions improve adherence rates?
The short answer is yes. Pharmacy interventions can be incredibly effective in closing gaps in care, increasing medication adherence rates, boosting quality performance, and improving outcomes—but only when powered by the right strategy and technology.
Let’s talk about the impact pharmacy interventions can have on adherence rates and what pharmacies can do to ensure success:
How Patient Interventions Benefit Pharmacies
When correctly implemented, pharmacy interventions can have a tremendous impact. Effective and efficient interventions benefit pharmacies in several ways, including:
Improved Quality Performance
Because medication-related clinical quality measures—such as adherence to medications for diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol—are triple-weighted, they have a significant impact on quality performance. By closing gaps in care related to medication non-adherence, pharmacies can achieve higher quality performance scores (not to mention more productive DIR contracts) and, in turn, better reimbursement rates.
Increased Positive Health Outcomes
In addition to driving improved quality performance, closing gaps in care with pharmacy interventions also directly impacts individual health outcomes. When patients take their medications as prescribed, they are more likely to have successful treatment outcomes and less likely to encounter negative consequences such as worsening health conditions, prolonged hospitalizations, and even mortality.
Benefits aside, pharmacy interventions can still go wrong without the right strategy and technology to ensure success. For example, many pharmacy intervention programs are rules-based, meaning every patient receives the same outreach—regardless of whether or not it will lead to a positive behavioral change.
4 Tips to Deploy More Effective Pharmacy Interventions
Here’s what pharmacies can do to deploy more efficient, cost-effective interventions:
Target the right high-risk patients
It starts with identifying patients who need the most support. Using artificial intelligence (AI), pharmacies can determine which patients have the highest risk of non-adherence and the highest likelihood of being influenced by an intervention. This way, they can be more strategic about which patients they target instead of reaching out to every non-adherent individual and hoping something sticks.
Take an omnichannel approach
With so many technologies available, why limit pharmacy interventions to just one? Although traditional adherence programs focused primarily on phone interventions, there are now various ways for pharmacies to intervene, and an omnichannel approach can be beneficial. For example, many patient support programs now incorporate text messaging, email, direct messaging, video, and phone calls. AI can also determine the optimal channel method to influence each individual.
Personalize intervention messaging
Next comes the content itself, and it requires personalization to be as cost-efficient and effective as possible. What will resonate most with each patient? Should pharmacy interventions serve as direct reminders, or should they include education to influence patients? Using AI technology, pharmacies can personalize engagements—including the content and the timing of the message—to have the greatest impact, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
Optimize interventions over time
The “set-it-and-forget-it” attitude doesn’t cut it in modern healthcare. In fact, the best patient support programs are ever-evolving, with pharmacy interventions constantly being altered and optimized for the greatest impact. AI has the potential to do just that, learning from new data to optimize and refine patient outreach over time.
Want an example of these benefits in action? A national retail pharmacy used AllazoHealth’s AI Engine to find and target patients who would respond to a dual intervention approach.