Globe Editorial
Patients who don’t take their drugs are one of the most challenging and expensive problems in medicine. To fix it, researchers and healthcare providers are trying out an age-old incentive: paying them. The spirit of experimentation, at least, is praiseworthy.
The bounties are small — $20 gift cards to restaurants, a chance to win between $10 and $100 in a lottery — but they seem to work. Clinics and researchers report that patients who were paid to take their drugs had better compliance and stayed on top of their appointments. There is, of course, the thorny ethical question of whether people should be rewarded for doing something they’re supposed to do. But if these small gifts are able to reduce health care costs by preventing costly complications down the road, they should be seriously considered, at least in some settings.
It won’t be a panacea, though. For many of the costlier, chronic conditions where patient compliance is a major issue, it might be impractical to offer gift cards and other perks year after year, just so patients don’t forget to take their meds. That money would be better spent providing doctors with tools to more efficiently monitor patients once they leave the examination room. Checking if Mr. Jones filled his prescription or calling him at home to see how that medicine is working could go a long way towards maintaining compliance — longer, perhaps, than that $20 meal at Applebee’s.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
