Kieger Healthcare Chart of the Month

What do you think, how many people still take their prescribed drugs after 12? My name is Urban Fritsche from Kieger.

Actually, the numbers are quite scary and vary significantly by the type of the disease. What is really scary, that even in disease conditions which are life threatening, often patients do not take their drugs.

So, for example: only 1 in 4 patients takes their asthma drug after 12 months, ony every second patients takes their diabetes medication after 12 months and just a little more than half of the patients take their HIV and MS drugs after one year.

These facts about drug compliance are another way to express the high unmet medical needs in our society. There is clear need for better therapies and medications. We need drugs with less side effects, drugs which are more effective and drugs which have long acting mechanisms in order to improve compliance of patients. Drug costs only make up for around 10% of total healthcare costs and especially chronic disease are important to control as they often lead to secondary malignancies if these diseases are not treated what increases overall costs to the society. Non-adherence costs are estimated to reach USD 290 bn as for example 10% of all hospitalizations go back to bad adherence to therapy.