Home Health & Hospice Week

If you're wondering how to get your patients to adhere to their medication regimens and improve their outcomes, you may want to consider an idea from a project in Philadelphia. One experimental program there is offering patients taking warfarin an opportunity to win $10 or $100 each day that they take the drug, reports The New York Times. Health insurer Aetna helped fund the program, and also pays physicians bonuses for prescribing preventive medications like beta blockers and statins, the newspaper says. "It's better to spend money on medication adherence for patients, rather than having them boomerang in and out of the hospital," Valerie Fleishman, executive director of the New England Healthcare Institute, a research organization, told the Times. About one-tenth of hospital admissions and one-quarter of nursing home admissions result from incorrect adherence to medication, Fleishman said. "Financial incentives are a critical piece of the solution," she told the [...]