A descriptive study of patients receiving foundational financial assistance through local specialty pharmacies

To describe the population of patients who received financial assistance from the Good Days Foundation (GDF) as facilitated by Walgreens local specialty pharmacies (LSPs).

This was a retrospective descriptive study.

This study used a joint foundational and pharmacy claim database between January 1, 2014, and December 31, 2016.

Among 1572 eligible patients who received GDF financial assistance as facilitated by Walgreens LSPs, 1524 had disease state information and 14 of these patients receveived financial assistance for 2 disease states (patient count denominator, 1538). The top 3 disease states by patient count were oncology (1403; 91.2%), multiple sclerosis (49; 3.2%), and hepatitis C (39; 2.5%). Of the 777 patients who had complete data and disease state information, 2 received finanical assistance for 2 disease states (denominator, 779); oncology remained the disease with the highest patient count (724; 92.9%). The mean annual financial assistance per patient was highest for hepatitis C ($4156), followed by oncology ($3603) and miscellaneous/rare disease ($1829), which covered 98.8%, 99.3%, and 99.6% of these patients' total co-pay requirements, respectively. In addition to prescription co-pay assistance, 21 patients received travel assistance of $554 per year per patient from GDF. The mean persistence of oncology patients was 170.7 days without a 30-day gap over 1 year of observation time.

The facilitation of treatment by GDF and Walgreens LSPs may be the key to many patients receiving their treatment and maintaining medication persistence. GDF co-pay assistance helped cover most out-of-pocket costs associated with medications and aided with travel expenses for patients, especially in the area of oncology. For many patients, this meant reducing the significant financial barriers to accessing care and facilitating the necessary treatment for their chronic or life-altering disease. Without this assistance, many patients would simply not have been able to meet the expected medication persistence and thus would have received suboptimal treatment.