HCA’s Methodist Healthcare Supports Patient Medication Affordability
Kate Kalthoff, MHA, HEC-C, VP of Patient Experience & Bioethics at HCA Methodist Healthcare shares their experience with CipherHealth’s Medication Affordability Program. To watch the full webinar and hear more about how this program works, click here.
Video Transcript
It’s worked really well. It surprised CipherHealth from what I understand. They had some predictions about how often the program was going to get used, and we surpassed that which was pretty incredible. So clearly, there was a need in our community for this kind of a program.
We knew that it was an issue we’d heard from patients, whether we were doing our rounding or whether we were picking it up in our survey comments that some folks out there really were making the choice between paying the rent, buying food or picking up their medication. So it was really important that we do something about that. Our mission statement says that we provide exceptional cost effective healthcare accessible to all. And this really fit the bill for us.
As of right now, every patient gets this discharge coupon, and they can use it at their pharmacy. They get a text message within an hour of being discharged. So even before they’ve made it home or made it to that pharmacy to get that medication, they’ve gotten that prescription card. And again, it’s just a real easy. They show it to the pharmacist, and they’ve been saving a tremendous amount of money per prescription. It surprised me that it’s about $60 per prescription that is saved.
