We use coupons for salad dressing, clothing, dry-cleaning, even manis and pedis. But what if you got one from your doctor for your meds?
Physicians Interactive (PI), a provider of online and mobile clinical resources and solutions for healthcare professionals (HCPs), announced today an automated voucher and coupon distribution solution for HCPs, called eCoupon. The eCoupon can be integrated into an HCP's ePrescribe workflow to provide patients with cost-savings on name-brand prescriptions once a medication has been prescribed by a physician, according to a company press release.
More than 875,000 physicians, nurses and allied healthcare professionals across all major specialties use PI’s online and mobile offerings, the press release notes.
PI officials said in the press release that the company has joined with Allscripts to enable delivery of eCoupons with Allscripts stand-alone ePrescribe™, electronic prescribing software. The agreement helps bring a digital coupon program to help physicians provide more benefits to patients within their ePrescribing workflow.
A lack of patient adherence to medication is a large and costly problem in the United States, adding an estimated 100 billion dollars in healthcare spending annually. Statistics show that 12 percent of all patients don’t fill their prescriptions, 12 percent don’t take the medication after they buy it, almost 29 percent of Americans stop taking their medication before it runs out, and 22 percent of Americans take less of the medication than is prescribed on the label.
I’m guilty of this. For the last several years I’ve been taking cholesterol medication and recently I thought, I’m exercising, I’m losing weight, I’m going to stop taking this. Not a wise idea.
But the coupons can help to improve “first-fill medication adherence, creating an opportunity for higher adherence rates in the future,” according to the press release.
eCoupon also consistently generates transactional reports and data to ensure that life science companies are able to gain insights on their target audience and stay up-to-date on their current eCoupon campaigns, the press release reports.
In 2011, the number of prescriptions being processed electronically climbed into the hundreds of millions, while the number of ePrescribers has more than tripled in only two years. Doctors increasingly are pitching the prescription pad. More than a third of the nation's prescriptions now are electronic, according to a story in The Daily News.
The story also reports that 36 percent of all prescriptions were coming in to pharmacies electronically by the end of last year, up from 22 percent a year earlier.
"PI's eCoupon fits directly into an existing workflow to give practitioners more efficient ways to select and distribute medication coupons and vouchers during the prescription process that can help reduce patient costs at the pharmacy and potentially improve overall compliance," said Donato Tramuto, CEO and vice chairman of PI. "As health systems strive to achieve Meaningful Use and adopt EHRs, there will be an increased importance on the exchange of clinical information between healthcare providers and their patients. eCouponing is a great example of a tool that can empower patients to take a more active role in their care and ultimately; strengthen the physician-patient relationship."
Edited by
Amanda Ciccatelli
