Milliman's report analyzed 2.5 million commercially insured patients aged 18 to 64 with diabetes, hypertension, or hyperlipidemia and found that patients with high risk scores showed a strong correlation between medication adherence and lower healthcare costs.

Key takeaways include:

• Employers and healthcare providers may benefit from stratifying patients by imputing health risk scores into their claims data.
• This process will improve insights into the relationship between adherence interventions and overall healthcare costs.
• In the study of more than 2.5 million commercially insured patients, 64.1% were adherent.
• For diabetes and hyperlipidemia, we observed that adherent patients had higher healthcare costs if their risk score was under 10.
• Adherent patients had significantly lower total healthcare costs when risk scores were above 10.
• Differences in healthcare costs for adherent patients did not follow a meaningful pattern until the population was divided into groups based on age and risk score.
• From a health plan’s perspective, stratifying the patient population by health risk and age may assist in decision making when reviewing the benefits of medication adherence-based programs, especially programs that have guarantees or pricing based on return on investment.