Michael Fischer, MD, Discusses Non-Adherence

Michael Fischer, MD, associate professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School, associate physician, Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said that the complexity of the healthcare system is part of the challenge of managing adherence. Beyond a patient agreeing to and understanding how to take a medication, there must be coordination both with the pharmacy and the insurer.

“There are so many steps in the process and each of those is an area where we lose some patients from medication adherence,” said Dr Fischer. “Lack of understanding, maybe, of the diagnosis, lack of belief in the medications, complexity of the system, cost of the medications—each of those can be a threat to adherence, and figuring out how to address those effectively for each individual patient is really the challenge we all face at this point.”