Project Identifying Patients with Economic Instability Reaches Completion

An intervention that RapidEval supported recently reached completion. This project aimed to identify patients with economic instability who might be more likely to be readmitted to the hospital.

Led by Dr. Shana Steinbeck, this project added questions to the admission process to identify patients who may not be able to afford their medications and see if this led to greater risk of readmission to the hospital.

The study team recently published an assessment of M Health Fairview patients based on the results of their newly included questions. They found that 5% of patients did not take their medication as prescribed in the past year because of cost and 3.4% could not afford their medication in the last 3 months. Patients who had difficulty affording their medications in the last 3 months had longer hospital stays than those who did not.

Out of patients who could not afford to take their medications as prescribed in the past 3 months, only 5% were referred to outpatient medication therapy management (MTM). This highlights an important gap and the need for an expansion of the MTM referral process.