Name: The cost of forgetting your pills
Uploaded: 2014-04-10
Duration: 4 min 11 s
Description: McKesson CEO John Hammergren says people who forget to fill their prescriptions make health care more costly for all patients.

[ MUSIC ]. I wanna give you some conventional wisdom. Tell me if it's fair or not fair. And this is, again, playing on the recent public policy debate. There's a sense that one of the problems with our healthcare industry is that there's, there's too much stuff, if you will. There's too many tests. There's too many packages. There's too many things that get thrown away constantly. Too many things that doctors order up whether or not they need them. Is, first of all, is that fair? And second of all, is that, is that going to change as time goes by? Because you benefit from all that stuff. I mean, you're providing a lot of that stuff, right? Well, I, I think over time, clearly there's a way, ways to bring efficiencies to healthcare. On the one hand, there's actually less demand than there should be in certain aspects of healthcare like pharmaceuticals, for example. Mm- hm. We actually think that when the physician makes a decision to help a patient with their treatment and prescribes pharmaceuticals as a part of that care process the, the lack of compliance actually causes, costs our system more money. Mm- hm. And, obviously, affects the health and well- being of the patient. And so, although, prescriptions, if you, if you look at it as a basket, a 100 % of the prescriptions that are written, only get filled at about a rate of 50 % or 60 %. Mm- hm. Initially when you walk out of a physicians office, and out of those original fills, the refills are a, but a small subset yet again. So, the actual consumption of pharmaceuticals in a well- run healthcare industry would probably go up. It could in fact double if we get the right utilization, and the right drugs, at the right time, and the right patients. But there are obviously other places where there's significant waste. Like tests I don't need. I don't have the paperwork, I'll take another, another radiology exam or another MRI because I, I don't have the images in front of us. And what McKesson is attempting to do is to automate a lot of that so that it is available and that its available at the time in the work flow of the next specialist that needs to see it. And then probably the third pillar of this cost is, is waste. Where the physician doesn't know what to, what test to order. The test is botched in the process, or it's simply done for defensive purposes. Yeap. There's some sort of malpractice risk th, the, their trying to guard against. Help me understand how this, how it is at a, at a very basic level that prescriptions don't get filled? I mean, as a, as a patient it's something that I can't relate to. I feel like every prescription that, that I get or that my family gets, gets filled and gets taken. I think part of it starts with just education. You know, so some patients come in and expect the physician to do something that they can't do or, or that they'll get well right away if they, if they take the drug and it doesn't work in the first week or two, they stop taking it and they don't understand that it's a long- term issue they're trying to deal with. And frankly, many times also, it's, it, the symptoms of their, of their illness may not be acute. So the urgency around getting their blood pressure medicine, for example, when they don't feel the, they don't feel any ill effect- Yeap. From having high blood pressure. It goes into their billfold. They might have the right intention to do it, and guess what. Three or four weeks later they still don't feel any better or any worse and they say, I don't need those drugs. But this sounds like human nature to me. I mean, will, will we, you know, can we get people to take their medicine and washing their hands and putting on a sweater when they're cold and what not. Yeah. Clearly, it really begins with education, and I think to the extent that we can educate patients as to why these drugs or medical protocols that they've been asked to follow will benefit them and, and some of that benefit will be derived through the education process but also through the systems we can provide so email alerts, text messaging. Did you take your, your medication this morning? the, the world of automation and connectivity is, is actually going to help and a lot of this compliance issue is, is frankly in a, in a lot of our aging population where the morning, the morning routines aren't always remembered. They may have problems remembering what color pills do they take when and to the extent that we can put automation in the home and connect the, the patients families in that care circle, I, we might get better outcomes and, and better compliance.

McKesson CEO John Hammergren says people who forget to fill their prescriptions make health care more costly for all patients.