By Ayanna Johnson, Health Policy Associate

NCL was proud to be a part of a new initiative Prescriptions for a Healthy America: A Partnership to Advance Medication Adherence that launched on May 2. This initiative is a partnership of patients, health care providers, pharmacy organizations, consumers, and health care industry leaders that are working together to advance policy solutions to improve patient health and reduce health care costs through improving rates of adherence.

NCL has been a leader in the medication adherence arena with its public education campaign Script Your Future. Launched in 2011, Script Your Future works to raise awareness among consumers, their family caregiver and health care professionals about the importance of taking medications as directed. Non-adherence costs the health care industry an estimated $290 billion a year and 125,000 people lose their lives annually from complications related to non-adherence. The stakes are high when it comes to encouraging patients to take their medication as directed.

A panel discussion, , announcing the launch of this new initiative included various players, including the National Consumers League, interested in improving rates of adherence.  Often patients have rational reasons for not adhering to their medicines; barriers such as cost, side effects and confusion about the purpose of medication all contribute to non-adherence. Sally Greenberg, Executive Director of National Consumers League, stressed that improving the communication between patients and their health care providers—communicating the consequences of poor adherence and impact of medication—increases the likelihood of better adherence.

Anita Allemand, Vice President of Product Innovation and Management for CVS Caremark noted that patients could save $8,000 a year with improved adherence. She added that the most critical element of improving adherence is face-to-face interactions between healthcare professionals and patients.

Dr. Rebecca Jaffe a board member of the American Academy of Family Physicians and family doctor said that health care professionals must engage their patients. “It is important that heath care professionals talk with them, not at them,” she said. Patients are often hesitant or unwilling to ask their doctors or pharmacists the essential questions that would enable increased adherence. Opening up this new line of communication and ensuring that patients feel comfortable asking questions and expressing worries about potential side effects, or how different drugs might affect each other, or what a patient can expect from a particular prescription will help people understand the need to adhere.

This new initiative is an exciting opportunity to bring together different voices from all parties concerned with the issue of non-adherence to work towards practical policy solutions. For more information about the initiative please visit the newly launched Web site.

For more information on the Script Your Future campaign visit www.scriptyourfuture.org.

By Michell K. McIntyre, Director of NCL’s Special Project on Wage Theft

April was not a good month for worker safety. Over a two-week span, four separate events – an explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas, a fire at an Exxon refinery in Texas, a building collapse in Bangladesh, and the death of a poultry plant inspector in New York– highlight the human cost of big business. It is estimated that every day in America, 13 workers go to their job and never come home.

This last Sunday, April 28, was Workers Memorial Day, a day set aside to honor the hundreds of thousands of men and women who have suffered and died on the job from workplace injuries and diseases. Each death has left friends and family behind to pick up the pieces and move on with a new reality. These are lives that could have been saved. Lives that, if the necessary precautions had been made and basic safety standards implemented, could have been prevented.

Big business has consistently put its interests ahead of the interests of its employees. Either through lobbying to weaken regulations and government oversight, or simply gross negligence, industry has gambled with people’s lives. Unfortunately, it is the workers who pay when this gamble fails. Government is continuously lobbied by industry to either weaken existing regulations or prevent new proposed regulations from becoming law. Industry has lobbied to skewer government agency budgets to prevent proper funding to agencies tasked with inspecting duties.

American companies have a responsibility to protect their employees.  Too often, big companies are deemed innocent of any wrongdoing in cases of preventable work-related injury. We must put pressure on these companies to raise safety standards throughout their supply chain to protect workers both at home and abroad. Stay tuned to nclnet.org for an in-depth piece on workplace disasters later this week.

By Rebecca Burkholder, NCL Vice President for Health Policy

I attended TEDMED last week, a one-of-a-kind event that explores the future of health and medicine through the lens of innovators and artists. During the three-day event at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, DC, we heard from an array of speakers on a variety of topics from the power of small data to monitor our health to treating gun violence as a health epidemic. Attendees even got a workout session with fitness guru Richard Simmons. The TEDMED format uses short talks that focus on the story behind the science. TED stands for technology, entertainment, and design—elements that are interwoven throughout the event.

NCL’s Rebecca Burkholder with the legendary Richard Simmons

NCL was invited to attend TEDMED because of our role in The 20 Great Challenges of Health and Medicines. Since last fall, we have been part of a team discussing one of the challenges: *The Role of the Patient. Through an online format, we have been discussing how patients engage (or are prevented from engaging) in their health care. The last day of TEDMED was focused specifically on the Great Challenges and coming up with solutions to the meet those Challenges. More on that below.

The overall theme of TEDMED 2013 was the power of connections. As TEDMED curator, Jay Walker stated “TEDMED brings together doctor, nurses, scientists, researchers, technologists, business leaders, policymakers, rescue workers, educators, armed service personnel, artists, media, and athletes all eager to share, learn listen and grow. The result? A series of creative collisions that spark imaginative new thinking.”

Each session contained a variety of talks, united by a theme. For instance, one session I found particularly riveting, was “Thinking Outside the (Check) Box.” The session included, among other things, Sue Austin showing off her work as an artist performing underwater in her scuba wheelchair. She claimed to be the most mobile person at TEDMED despite being paralyzed from the waist down. *Jessica Richman asked if a citizen scientist (a person with no formal science training) could ever win the Nobel Prize in science. Ryan Panchadsaram shared his ideas for the uses of data in public policy, and Salvatore Iaconesi described how his community, both in person and online, helped him deal with his brain cancer diagnosis and say “Hey Cancer! You’re not all there is to me!”

Finally, Andrew Solomon, who was one of the more compelling speakers of the three-day conference, offered his ideas on the merging of illness, identity, and relationships, and his opinion that relationships of all types help us deal with illness.

The last day of the conference focused on *The 20 Great Challenges of Health and Medicine. The Great Challenges Day, hosted by George Washington University and made possible by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, kicked off with a plea to recognize the inherent value of stories that lie behind the data. As part of *The Role of the Patient Challenge, we were charged with using storytelling to understand the issue and plot out potential solutions. Our team of about 25 participants gathered and with the help of a doodle artist, came up with a host of solutions. For more on what the Challenge teams came up with, follow the TEDMED Great Challenges in the coming weeks and months. *Join in on the conversion about the Role of the Patient and how we can change our culture from one that provides care to patients to creating heath with patients!

*Links are no longer active as the original sources have removed the content, sometimes due to federal website changes or restructurings.

The student team from Paxon School for Advanced Studies in Jacksonville, FL was crowned national LifeSmarts champions in Atlanta on Tuesday, April 23. After a tough final match against the second-place team from Barrington High School in Rhode Island, the teens from the Florida outscored their opponents and did it with great sportsmanship. Teams from Tennessee and Pennsylvania placed third. Congratulations to everyone who participated in this year’s tournament, the biggest ever, and helped make the competition a huge success. Hopefully we will see everyone again at our national tournament next year in…Orlando. Stay up to date on consumer issues year round by following NCL on Twitter at NCL_Tweets.

Pic submitted via Twitter from@ndweinberg. Follow the event! #LifeSmarts2013

We have officially passed the halfway point of the LifeSmarts competition, and by the day’s close we will know our final four teams. Today, the students will have a short break from competition as former NFL pro-bowler Warrick Dunn comes to LifeSmarts to participate in our Visa Financial Football event. To stay up-to-date on the latest scores, follow our competition on Facebook and Twitter. #LifeSmarts2013