California Assemblywoman Susan A. Bonilla has partnered with the California Pharmacists Association and the California Healthcare Institute to introduce legislation (AB 2418) that improves the process for medical patients to obtain their prescription drugs and follow their doctor's instructions on taking their medications.
"Poor medication adherence costs the US health system $290 billion dollars in other health care expenditures, such as emergency room visits and unnecessary physician office visits," said Jon Roth, Chief Executive Officer for the California Pharmacists Association. "Assembly member Bonilla's legislation will go a long way to improving medication adherence by allowing patients to receive their medication in a way that is most convenient to them and all those medications to be synchronized with all their other drugs, resulting in the best chance for a patient to successfully complete all of their prescriptions."
Specifically, this bill:
* Allows patients to opt out of their health plan’s mandatory mail order program if they prefer to obtain their prescription drugs from a community pharmacy.
* Streamlines prescription medications by placing the patient’s medications on the same refill schedule.
* Allows patients who run out of prescription eye medications because of accidental spillage or who use more than 70% of their eye drops to be eligible for an early refill.
Pharmacy programs seem to be the best way forward, and there’s hard data to back that up. Case in point – the successful Appointment-Based Model program being used at Thrifty White, a Midwest chain of pharmacies. (For more information on the Thrifty White program, see the article, Adherence and persistence associated with an appointment-based medication synchronization program, from the December 2013 edition of the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association
By creating processes that support and improve patient access to medications; patients experience better health outcomes and improved quality of life. Patients who pick up their medications at their local pharmacy have the opportunity to talk with their pharmacist about how to properly take their medications and to understand the positive benefits of taking their medications.
