Medication adherence support can improve health outcomes in rural communities, despite the many challenges they face. For the details about why, check out these articles:

• What Are the Top Challenges in Rural Healthcare?
• How Can Medication Adherence Improve Rural Health Outcomes? 
• What Is Medication Adherence Support in Rural Communities?

This article explains the value of remote medication adherence support for rural communities in more detail, which is important to a strong business case for it. Let’s consider five points of value.

1. Delivering Better Outcomes for Burdensome Diseases + Conditions

When individuals take their medication as prescribed, they’re much more likely to prevent their health from worsening or to recover altogether. We regularly see success stories for rural health issues like obesity, type-2 diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, mental health, and opioid treatment.

One reason we see such success is we efficiently deliver multiple clinically validated interventions in one program. We combine medication review, education, video directly observed therapy (vDOT), and more to help individuals take the right medication in the right way at the right time. As one participant explains it:

“Taking my medication and sharing progress with my team helped me build a habit. That consistency is key. I enjoyed connecting with my Scene family, [who were] offering encouragement.”

The Scene Health solution achieves very high medication adherence rates, averaging 80-90%.

2. Augmenting the Rural Healthcare Workforce

A rural community doesn’t have to build its own program with limited staff and resources. A turnkey program like Scene Health provides highly credentialed staff and well-maintained technology infrastructure that extend the rural workforce model. 

Our solution also takes care of all operational details, from recruiting participants to measuring impact and beyond. We honed every aspect of the program over more than a decade of implementation with 750 clients across public health agencies, healthcare providers, health plans, and more.

3. Enabling Home-Based Care

When implemented remotely the way Scene Health is, rural residents don’t have to worry about the time and expense of traveling to an appointment. They also experience more privacy, avoiding the stigma many rural residents can feel when seeking help. At the same time, the rural healthcare system doesn’t have to find or build infrastructure such as offices for appointments.

4. Reducing Strain on the Rural Healthcare System

When individuals are managing conditions like type-2 diabetes, obesity, and high cholesterol effectively, they are less likely to have to visit an emergency room, call 911, or use other emergency services. They also are less likely to require expensive and hard-to-access medical treatments or interventions like surgery. At Scene Health, we often see a 26% reduction in emergency room visits and in-patient stays.

5. Achieving ROI through Compounding Impact

The benefits above combine to create a sizable return on investing in medication adherence support. As Health Affairs has noted, “Improving medication adherence thus offers one of those rare opportunities in healthcare to achieve multiple desired endpoints from the same policy.” At Scene Health, we see the ROI ratio as high as 2:1 because our solution is both effective and easy to scale.

Scaling Medication Adherence Support in Rural Communities

With the right approach, medication adherence support can achieve breakthrough health outcomes and tremendous value in rural areas. We make this support practical for the realities of rural healthcare through our turnkey approach and clinically validated interventions. 

At Scene Health, we want every rural community to experience improved health outcomes at a high level of value..That’s why we assembled an in-depth new guide, Rural Healthcare Transformation through Medication Adherence Support. If you want to close gaps in care for rural communities, this is your starting point for a scalable solution.