John Hopkins Hospital is taking a different approach to hepatitis C virus infections and is seeing higher patient adherence rates and improved outcomes, Gastroenterology and Endoscopy News reports.
Here's are four things you should know.
1. The clinical specialty pharmacists and nurses at Johns Hopkins use a triage method, called stoplight protocol, to boost patient adherence rates to HCV treatment therapy.
2. Before prescriptions are prescribed, patients are put through a standardized screening and then tagged with a stoplight color based on how well they understand the medication's benefits and side effects and how likely they are to adhere to the treatment plan.
3. The stoplight color patients are assigned also dictates the "programmatic monitoring" of the therapy. Patients that are red receive several more follow-up appointments and check-in phone calls than the yellow or green patients.
4. Scott Canfield, PharmD, said the service has worked well. Only 4.2 percent of patients abandon a treatment therapy after it begins which is comparable to that of a closely monitored HCV drug trial.
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