Dan Munro
Posted 3/05/12 on Forbes
You may recall that last year the DOJ agreed to a settlement with Google for $500 million. Basically Larry Page needed to avoid criminal prosecution for actively helping Canadian Pharmacies advertise to American consumers more effectively with Google AdWords. That alone probably wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows except that the profits were being siphoned away from American pharmaceutical companies (at scale) and of course that simply can’t be allowed to happen. Pure speculation on my part to say that pharma lobbying helped, but in either case, the DOJ filed criminal charges which forced the settlement. Open and shut case – now closed. But here’s the thing – it’s a story that keeps repeating itself – in not so nuanced ways. This time the thread starts with a fairly safe and upbeat report from our Nations largest e-prescribing network – Surescripts. Aptly titled: E-Prescribing Shown to Improve Outcomes and Save Healthcare System Billions of Dollars. Fabulous news. Let’s dive in.
So it turns out that the first bit of news isn’t that good. According to the World Health Organization “as many as 50% of patients do not adhere fully to their medication treatment, leading to 125,000 premature deaths and $290B annually in the form of increased hospitalizations and costly complications (U.S. only).” Ok – so that’s not good at all. It’s easy to dismiss the data (it’s from 2003) but still – 50%? According to Kaiser Permanente there were about 3.7B prescriptions filled in the U.S. in 2010 for a total in retail sales of about $221B. So, in effect, the healthcare costs of poor drug adherence exceeds the total retail sales of all drugs in this country ($290B vs. $221B). While those two numbers aren’t related – it’s safe to say that the cost of poor drug adherence trumps any incremental value we’re able to get through e-prescribing by a very wide margin. In effect, non-adherence accounts for almost 10% of our $3 trillion National Healthcare Expenditure (NHE).
