Receiving Medications by Mail May Improve Compliance After Stroke
After a stroke, patients who receive prescribed statins and anticoagulants by mail are more likely to take the medication as directed than patients who get their medication from local pharmacies, according to a study.
William P. Neil, MD, of Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, and colleagues studied the prescription refill records of patients discharged with ischemic stroke from 24 hospitals who received new anticoagulant and cholesterol-lowering medications between 2006 and 2015.
A total of 48,746 patients refilled one of those medications, including 205,085 prescriptions for statins (136,722 by pharmacy and 68,363 by mail) and 50,483 prescriptions for anticoagulants (34,682 by pharmacy and 15,801 by mail).
The investigators found that patients who picked up their medications from local pharmacies were adherent about 47% of the time. Patients who had their medications mailed to them were adherent almost 74% of the time. Participants who only used local pharmacies were 56.4% adherent to their prescriptions for statins, whereas patients who received statins by mail were nearly 88% adherent.
Among people taking anticoagulants, adherence was about 45% for those using their local pharmacies versus 56% for mail-order customers.