Overactive Bladder Medication Access

The price range, insurance coverage, and side effect burden of overactive bladder medications is broad and varied. An internal quality improvement project was undertaken to improve patient ability to access and ultimately adhere to preferred medication therapy for treatment of overactive bladder.

Our objective was to increase the percentage of patients per month at an academic Urogynecology practice who receive their preferred overactive bladder medication from baseline 39.5% to 45%.

Data were extracted via Epic report. Manual chart review and calls to patients and/or pharmacy were completed to obtain status of medication access and reasons why medications were not taken. A targeted intervention was implemented with creation of a written document to help guide patients with options to decrease prescription costs. After this document was embedded into Epic after visit summary documentation, a repeat analysis was performed.

The most common barrier to medication access was cost; specifically, the medication was not covered and a prior authorization was not initiated. Before the intervention, more than 60% of patients did not persist with their initially prescribed overactive bladder medication at a 6-month follow-up interval from office visit. Following implementation of a cost-navigation guide, persistence increased to 45.5% at a 3-month follow-up interval.

A targeted intervention on cost navigation of prescriptions can have a positive effect on patient access and persistence of using overactive bladder medications. Our practice continues to use our prescription navigation handout.