The importance of patient support

Ensuring that patients take their medications as prescribed is a key to successful therapy. However, it has also been recognized as a growing challenge in health care systems worldwide.

Non-adherence and poor compliance can have serious impact on health, as patients do not receive optimal therapy for their condition. Poor adherence is often associated with increased healthcare use, morbidity, and mortality. It also causes additional costs due to waste of medicines, manpower/man-days and time.

Patients’ non-adherence to medications costs EU governments an estimated €125 billion annually. It contributes to premature deaths of nearly 200,000 European citizens a year:

• Approximately 20% to 50% of patients do not adhere to the prescribed medical therapy
• It is estimated that 2 0% – 30% of patients do not adhere to the prescribed regimens which are curative or intended to relieve symptoms
• 30% – 40% fail to follow the recommended preventive regimens

The numbers for long-term medication regimens are even more dramatic. The World Health Organization (WHO) report reveals that when the long-term therapy is prescribed, approximately 50% of patients fail to adhere to the regimen. The main reasons for not taking medication are:

• Forgetfulness (71%)
• Lack of belief that the medication was needed (20%)
• The belief that the condition has improved and that the medication is not needed (16%)

Although the factors which may contribute to non-adherence are complex and challenging to address, including forgetfulness, confusion due to a complex treatment regimen, struggle with self-administration, side effects, no perceived benefit etc., it is of the utmost importance that all the stakeholders gather in the effort of encouraging the patients to adhere to their therapies and to achieve health outcomes that are as good as possible.

This is particularly critical in countries of lower GDP with more challenging access to expensive medication. The collaboration includes policy makers (Ministry of Health, health insurance funds), healthcare professionals, pharmaceutical companies, patients and their associations, families/caregivers and the media.

Weare proud to be among the pioneers in Croatia to develop tailor-made patient support programs (PSPs) for various needs of different groups of patients, therapies and healthcare systems.

PSPs are designed to use multiple methods of interaction and multiple communication channels to assist in improving compliance to therapy.

A strategy to create and deploy incentives for health professionals and patients to integrate therapy adherence in treatment plans, focusing on quality instead of the volume of care services:

• Increases therapy adherence
• Helps dismantle barriers
• Streamlines the adoption of practices

Our activities in the field of PSP are compliant with all applicable laws and regulations.

We see each PSP as a tailor-made program which helps the patients in managing their disease(s) in a better way. Each patient is unique, and so is each medicinal product and medical device. We in Marti Farm recognize the particular needs of patients, the industry and payers, and work together with our partners for the benefit of all.