Cost, Access Barriers Limit Women’s Use of Heart Monitors: Lindsey Valenzuela, PharmD

High costs and uneven insurance coverage keep wearable heart monitors out of reach for many women, according to Lindsey Valenzuela, PharmD, APh, BCACP, vice president of population health integration at Desert Oasis Healthcare.

Valenzuela told The American Journal of Managed Care^® (AJMC^®) that women with lower income or education levels often face the greatest barriers to adopting these technologies. She emphasized that pharmacists, who are among the most accessible health professionals, can help close these gaps by educating patients, coordinating care, and improving follow-up.

Check out the last part of Valenzuela’s interview, where she highlights the biggest factors preventing women from accessing early arrhythmia detection tools.

This transcript has been lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

What barriers do women face in accessing early arrhythmia detection technologies, and how might pharmacy teams help bridge those gaps?

Wearable monitors can be expensive, and insurance coverage is really inconsistent. Those with a lower income, education, or socioeconomic background may find that they're also less comfortable with technology and aren't accessing the health care system in the same way that those in different socioeconomic brackets are accessing. Costs can really be an issue for those who are under- or uninsured. Access is usually determined by specialists, which may be in short supply in rural or underserved communities, which also then leads to limiting access for that monitoring. Then once you get that monitor, translating the results of those monitors requires that coordination of care between specialists, primary care, and patient.

The value of pharmacists is that pharmacists transcend all areas of health care. From your most accessible outpatient pharmacists at your local pharmacy to those in a hospital or clinics or serving medical groups—which is my background—guiding and having pharmacists as part of the entire health care team in a medical group, we're experts at navigating the health care system. We can help people understand their coverage and navigate the system, which can be really tricky at times. Those outpatient pharmacists might be the first to actually hear about these symptoms from patients.

In rural areas, from women who are simply going in to treat maybe part of their family—because we know that women really prioritize the management of the health of their family—they might be going in for another thing and letting you know about symptoms, and we can serve as that conduit of information to primary care or specialists. Refill encounters are a really excellent way to reinforce the reasons why we might want monitoring, as well as the relationship to the medications that they're taking.

In our setting, in a medical group setting, pharmacists work alongside the cardiology physicians to help determine the need for monitors, to educate, to apply, and to help ensure adherence, and then make sure that loop is closed and patients actually get the results and the follow-up to know what to do with all that information. But without help to navigate the system, those in underserved communities, women who are really prioritizing other parts of their life, are going to find difficulty in navigating and getting these early detection technologies.