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Primary medication nonadherence (failure to fill a newly prescribed medication) occurs in up to 25% of high-risk patients and is a cause of preventable morbidity. Poverty-related stressors have been linked to nonadherence in prior studies, although none utilized pharmacy records to examine its local determinants. In the current study, researchers used electronic prescription data from one large pharmacy chain in a single metropolitan area along with census data to assess whether a patient's neighborhood characteristics or the type of medication prescribed is associated with nonadherence.
The researchers analyzed nearly 214,000 new prescriptions for patients aged 0 to18 years over a 6-month period. Primary nonadherence (defined here as not pi…