Over the coming weeks, pharmacy students from the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine (LECOM) will be promoting the importance of medication adherence throughout the communities of Erie, PA, and Bradenton through the national Script Your Future Medication Adherence Team Challenge.

The Script Your Future Medication Adherence Team Challenge is a two-month intercollegiate competition that engages health profession student teams and faculty across the U.S. in raising public awareness about medication adherence as a critical public health issue. Since the competition launched in 2011, over 15,000 students throughout the country have advised nearly 65,000 consumers and educated more than 24.5 million Americans on why using medication as directed is so important.

Statistics show three out of four individuals do not take their medication as prescribed and one out of three patients never fills their prescriptions. More than a third of medication-related hospitalizations are because a patient did not take medication as prescribed, and each year nearly 125,000 U.S. deaths are attributed to non-adherence. From a financial standpoint, non-compliance translates to approximately $300 billion annually in additional costs for doctor appointments, emergency room visits, hospital admissions and additional medicine.

LECOM Bradenton