When mental health patients cannot get their prescription drugs under Medicaid, it leads to more emergency visits and longer hospital stay, according to a new study. The study which was reported by the Health Behavior News Service, part of the Center for Advancing Health, states that this is hard on patients and costly for the entire health care system.
Lead author Joyce West, Ph.D., and colleagues analyzed Medicaid data from 10 states and found that psychiatric patients who reported access problems with their medication visited the emergency department 74 percent more often than those who had no such difficulties.
Of the 1,625 patients West and colleagues tracked, almost a third could not access the clinically indicated or preferred medication because Medicaid did not approve it. Patients with medication access issues experienced 72 percent more acute hospital stays compared to patients without access problems.
Access problems included prescribed medication being discontinued, temporarily stopped or not covered. Some patients had problems making the co-payment.
"What''s particularly troubling is that it can often take several trials and many months, if not longer, to find an appropriate medication regimen that a patient responds to," said West, policy research director at the American Psychiatric Institute for Research and Education and an assistant professor of mental health at Johns Hopkins University.
The study appears in the November-December issue of the journal General Hospital Psychiatry.
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Policymakers can save money in the Medicaid program by clamping down on medication, but other areas including emergency room visits will undeniably increase, said Ken Duckworth, medical director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
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Duckworth said incarceration it particularly is important for patients with conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder to take medications consistently.
Source-Newswise