Medication costs represent a significant portion of patient out-of-pocket (OOP) costs. Patients wish that their primary care clinicians would discuss ways to reduce their medications with them. Clinicians are willing to do so but are concerned about time. Viable strategies exist for reducing OOP medication costs including generic substitution, class substitution, pill splitting, 90-day prescribing, stopping medications, and referral to social workers, change in insurance and low cost programs.
Embedding brief medication affordability questions, (e.g. Is the cost of any of these medications a burden for you?") into the medication reconciliation process provides a means for nursing staff to screen for OOP medication costs. Training nursing staff in screening and training clinicians in actionable strategies for addressing these OOP medication concerns during visits represents viable strategies for workflow integration. Providing prompts and resources for these steps and strategies will reinforce their integration.
We will recruit five practices and provide them with education, training, and resources. We will adopt rigorous, mixed quantitative and qualitative methods for evaluating our intervention.
The primary objective of this project is to assess the feasibility and impact of a team-based approach to promoting cost-of-medications conversations. Our questions are:
December 2016 – March 2018
In progree/post intervention data collection
Addressing Medication Costs During Primary Care Visits: A Before/after Study of Team-based Training. Jennifer K. Carroll, MD, MPH; Subrina Farah, MS; Robert J. Fortuna, MD, MPH; Angela M. Lanigan, MPA, RD; Mechelle Sanders, BA; Jineane V. Venci, PharmD, MS-CI; Kevin Fiscella, MD, MPH. Ann Intern Med. 2019;170(9_Supplement):S46-S53.
A Practical Approach to Reducing Patients' Prescription Costs. Kevin Fiscella, MD, MPH, Jineane Venci, PharmD, MS-CI, BCACP, Mechelle Sanders, BA, Angela M. Lanigan, MPA, RD, and Robert J. Fortuna, MD, MPH. Fam Pract Manag. 2019 May-June;26(3):5-9.
If you are interested in this topic, find our online community on AAFP Connect for updates and resources related to cost of medications conversations. To join, please contact Angie Lanigan at alanigan@aafp.org.
For additional information about this study, please contact:
Jen Carroll, MD, MPH
Network Director
AAFP National Research Network
1-800-274-2237, ext. 6146
jcarroll@aafp.org
Angie Lanigan, MPA, RDN, LD
Research Project Manager
AAFP National Research Network
1-800-274-2237, ext. 6382
alanigan@aafp.org
This study is funded by grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.