(M2) Measuring Medical Cost Offsets from Improvements in Medication Adherence Using Real-World Data

It is generally accepted that improvements in medication adherence result in greater disease control and lower medical spending. However, real-world evidence demonstrating this association using rigorous analytic methods is limited. Yet, many managed care pharmacy programs report medical cost savings associated with their clinical adherence improvement programs using opaque internal methods and/or external publications that may not apply to their specific program or population.

This session will review the critical scientific literature assessing the association between medication adherence and medical costs. Best practices for measuring and operationalizing adherence and modelling the relationship to reduce bias concerns due to confounding/endogeneity will be presented. In addition, this faculty will discuss results from analyses applying these best practices to real-world medical and pharmacy benefit claims data on more than 17 million commercial insured lives across seven chronic conditions.