CVS CareMark Puts Out A Study on Medication Compliance Based on Chronic Conditions And Where Patients Get Their Drugs

This is nice to have some “crunched” numbers based on data the company has internally and if you want to look at medication compliance, this is the way to do it with a report and not brought down to individual levels.  So many folks today don’t know how to work with data and reports and are naïve and gullible though.  I consider this report as “interesting” to look at and that’s about it and as long as it is not used to justify and reductions in drugs supplied to patients then that’s ok. 

There are issues though when folks go too far with such stats and take it down to a personal level to sell software and algorithms like the FICO software that claims they can take information from the web and combine it with your credit score to determine compliance and that is just mis-matched data to make a buck and eventually lean folks over deny the type of medications provided.  That does happen when you have employees barely trained to work in certain departments that have to rely on what’s on the screen as so much data is becoming flawed for spun marketed for the sake of money.  As the old saying goes “numbers don’t lie but people do”.  You can read more on the obnoxious efforts of FICO below and see what a sham they are trying to sell with analytics and cutting a space out to sell data. 

FICO Analytics Press Release Marketing Credit Scoring Algorithms to Predict Medication Adherence–Update (Opinion)

This brings me around to repetition of information on the web and how it creates doubt.  If I put 2+2=5 on this website and everyone retweeted it and is circulated all over and showed up again in a few months with the same marketing scheme, people might think “what is this, I keep seeing this, is there something to this?”  Again I am being obnoxious with the example to drive the point home. 

We have digital illiterates who buy in to this stuff and think everything they read is gospel when it is not, and then studies can get created from some of what is in print, we read it all the time out there, so again this report is “interesting” but is no more than that.  BD 

The State of the States Adherence Report reviews how patients in all 50 states are, or are not, taking their medications as directed by their doctors. The information was compiled using CVS Caremark's comprehensive database and looking at medication adherence factors for four common chronic disease states – hypertension, dyslipidemia (high cholesterol), diabetes and depression. Adherence was calculated based on a variety of factors including how much medication a patient has on hand, when and if they refill a prescription on time, how they access their drugs (e.g., at a retail pharmacy location or through mail order) and how often generic medications are dispensed

http://www.cvscaremarkfyi.com/rx-adherence/data-hub