Addressing the Barriers of Medication Adherence Through Digital Health

Below is a brief excerpt of the interview, which has been edited for length and clarity. Watch the video to listen to more of the discussion.

Q: What is Prescryptive Health and how is the organization addressing medication adherence?

A: Prescriptive Health at its core is a healthcare consumer technology company. What we are trying to do is change the prescription management experience for for consumers. So for us patients, everybody, there's something called an electronic prescription. After a doctor or a nurse or a PA asks you the question of where you want your prescription sent, you usually would say CVS, or Costco, or Walgreens or somewhere. After the doctor offers a prescription, you go to the pharmacy and you discover price. You discover whether there's a prior authorization required.

There's all this activity that happens after you've already left the doctor's office and it can be prohibitively expensive. Roughly 30% to 40% of Americans have said at one point in their life, they've abandoned at the pharmacy, because it's too expensive. So it's a definitely a barrier for medication therapy.

What we're planning to do is change this; we call it a digital prescription. What happens is the prescription lands on your phone, in the doctor's office seconds after the doctor offers that prescription. We do a geolocation of all pharmacies around you and we show you the price of all of them with your benefits and benefit price.

We have the opportunity to pull in things like pharma assistance, if the manufacturer is willing to take a coupon. We can show that right at the point of care and also if there's going to be a delay on your medication. For example, what to expect when you get to the pharmacy, maybe there is a prior authorization. And you can have a value based conversation with your doctor.

If you think about the cost to the to the American taxpayer — to us broadly in the United States on not taking medication — it's somewhere around $300 billion of additional medical spend, because people aren't taking their medication. Part of the reason is just getting access to medications, which we're trying to solve at Prescryptive.