Patients from all racial and ethnic minority groups who got prescription refills through an online patient portal had better medication adherences, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. “Our findings are consistent with other studies that suggest providing tools for health care management, such as online refills, can help improve health behavior such as medication adherence,” said lead author Courtney Lyles, PhD, affiliate investigator at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research and assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco.
According to a recent report by the National Institutes of Health, Americans with chronic conditions only take their medications as prescribed about 50% to 60% of the time. Poor adherence costs the health care system $100 billion to $300 billion each year, and results in about 125,000 deaths.
This study examined patients with diabetes from Kaiser Permanente Northern California who had been using My Health Manager. Patients who began consistently refilling their statin prescriptions online showed a 4% improvement in adherence. Those who used online refilling tended to be younger and were taking more recurring medications than those not refilling online. Also, they used the patient portal more frequently at the onset of the study. African-American portal users were less likely to use the online tool to refill their prescriptions, and all racial and ethnic minority groups had lower statin adherence compared to white patients at baseline. For more information,