We have all heard the statistics many times concerning the high proportion of patients who for whatever reason do not follow a prescribed treatment regime, even though they have taken time out to attend an appointment with their GP, and clearly most patients who visit a GP do have a genuine health problem of some kind. Eve in life threatening situations some patients do not reliably take, for example, anti-rejection drugs, sometimes with tragic consequences.
We are all taught in business school that it costs more to acquire a new customer than it does to develop more business with an existing customer. I see an exact analogy for Pharma companies here. Namely it must make sense to make more effort to keep patients taking a prescribed course of treatment, rather than spending primarily to keep getting new patients prescribed any particular medicine. You know that masses of the new patients will drop away right from the start.
It is clear that with, for example the New Medicines Service (NMS) that the DOH believe that pharmacists have a useful role to play in supporting adherence, at least within the therapy groups that have been selected for the scheme. If you are a company with products in the chosen NMS areas, then you may have relatively little to do other than think of how to constructively help pharmacists support your product/s via NMS. If however you have a high value brand, with worthwhile patent life, NOT in one of the NMS categories, then you must go it alone.
Your problem may be that you have experienced staff around already lined up to promote GP prescribing, but you have few if any staff with the experience of developing practicable adherence support activities. In such a situation it makes sense to look around for outside assistance from an organisation that understands adherence and has maybe developed some practical solutions usually together with pharmacists, and is open to work with you specifically on your product/s.
Factors that I have found are vital to any successful adherence improvement process include better understanding:
* Not adhering well is usually justified in the patients mind, and unless their justification is explored and intelligently revised, it will always hold them back
*The patients feelings and aspirations strongly influence their behaviour, if only we asked what they were
* Patients often need to be helped to understand the treatment as well or better than the illness itself
* Most patients will respond best if there is more than one adherence support intervention
* Not all patients can be helped to adhere to treatment well, but by developing an understanding of the various possible product and ailment specific reasons for non-adherence, the available effort can be targeted at those most likely to be receptive to the help.
In short adherence support needs to be tailored specifically to your products and the therapy area, and in my opinion pharmacists are best placed to do this work, if appropriately motivated to do so.