Ali McBride talks about patient issues with medication adherence and what payers are doing to ensure compliance.
When we're looking at oral oncolytics, it's a different type of therapy out there. The pharmacist has a role, the clinical ambulatory oncology pharmacy has a role. Working with different healthcare providers, the physician team, the financial team, and specialty pharmacy as well to make sure the patient has access to oral oncolytics.
That's probably the biggest issue when we're taking a look at that type of therapy is because patients may not either be able to afford an out‑of‑pocket expense, and may not even pick up the prescription.
We're seeing lots of variations in terms of how patients currently take their oral chemotherapy, or oral oncolytic. Currently, we actually have many roles in which first, we make sure the patient is adherent, or has access to therapy, and taking the therapy.
We're looking at any dose modifications either up in terms of change in the dose, or decrease in the dose maybe because of drug interactions, or toxicity side effects, and also looking at compliance measure as well, and make sure these patients continue on with treatment therapy.
That's actually one of our initial roles in this type of setting. We're still evaluating other roles in this type of feature. Maybe even looking further at another area as we develop this role for oral oncolytics which is medication therapy management, or MTM.
There's a lot of work that goes into this, and we have seen multiple measures coming from insurers as well as hospital, or healthcare systems in which they're looking at medication therapy management from an oncolytic standpoint which may help facilitate compliance, but also maximize adherence, and decrease the risk of drug interactions which often occur with these therapies.