Education on Medication Adherence Will Reduce Costs, Improve Outcome

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Jim Rosack
Increasing patient adherence to antipsychotics directly reduces health care expenditures across the board.

Reducing unnecessary antipsychotic polypharmacy through prescriber education and improving patients’ adherence to their antipsychotic medication regimens using proven patient education techniques is associated with large reductions in expenditures within the Medicaid system, new data suggest.

"Antipsychotic medications are the cornerstone of therapy," noted Dilip Jeste, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and neurosciences and the Estelle and Edgar Levi Chair in Aging at the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine. "It has been known for some time that medication adherence associated with schizophrenia is not great."

The hope was that the advent of the second-generation antipsychotics—marketed for their broad efficacy and improved side-effect profiles—would lead to improvements in adherence, but that has yet to be shown conclusively.

"We did a study a few years ago with our VA population, and what we found was that it was the glass-half-empty, glass-half-full story: we used two major indicators of medication adherence in the study. With one measure, the newer medications looked significantly better than the older typicals, but with the second measure, there was no statistically significant difference." Other research has come to similar conclusions.