Study Team

Dominique (Medaglio) Comer, ChristianaCare (PI); Daniel Elliott ChristianaCare (Mentor)

What we wanted to learn and why it matters

Patients’ medication adherence is critical for effective chronic disease management. Poor medication adherence can have severe consequences for patients’ health outcomes and costs. While many studies have examined how patients take medications once they have them (secondary adherence), few have studied the reasons why patients do not fill initial prescriptions (primary adherence). Understanding and being able better identify patients with primary and secondary nonadherence is critical to developing programs that can improve adherence and health outcomes and reduce costs. To these ends, our study examined rates of primary and secondary adherence among about 2,000 ChristianaCare patients with ischemic heart disease.

What we did and learned

We linked pharmacy claims data to the electronic prescriptions of patients with ischemic heart disease, examined primary and secondary nonadherence rates and developed risk prediction models for non-adherence.

To read more about this study

Medaglio D, Glasgow J, Zhang Z, Elliott D. Noninitiation of Discharge Medications After Revascularization. J Manag Care Spec Pharm. 2020 Mar;26(3):305-310. doi: 10.18553/jmcp.2020.26.3.305. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32105182/