By Sheila Roberson
roberson@rx.uga.edu
The Medication Access Program of UGA’s College of Pharmacy has received $914,000 from  the Carlos and Marguerite Mason Trust to facilitate access to medications for solid-organ transplant patients who reside in Georgia. The three-year grant is an expansion of an earlier three-year Mason Trust grant, in the amount of $490,000, that helped establish the program.
Marie Chisholm, director of the program, says that a staggering 50 percent of solid-organ transplant patients have difficulty paying the estimated $10,000 to $15,000 per year for transplant medications. Many patients who have health insurance with prescription coverage can’t afford the required co-payment, while those without prescription coverage have even greater financial difficulty purchasing their medication.
“The cost of the prescribed medication is clearly one of the leading reasons solid-organ transplant patients don’t take their medication as prescribed,” Chisholm says, adding that noncompliance to medication is directly related to organ rejection, hospitalizations, morbidities from untreated disease, decrease in quality of life, and, in some cases, death.
MAP is the first program of its kind in the country. To date, it has enrolled more than 150 Georgia transplant patients, referred from transplant centers and other facilities throughout the state.
From October 1999 through June 2000, MAP and another program directed by Chisholm—the Optimizing Renal Transplant Medication Outcomes and Compliance through Pharmacist Intervention Program, funded by a $340,000 Mason Trust grant—supplied Georgia’s solid-organ transplant patients with more than $525,000 in medication from pharmaceutical companies and medication assistance programs.
“Patients can receive their medications from their physicians, from a pharmacy with a medication voucher or by direct mail from the pharmaceutical company,” notes Chisholm, who is also an assistant professor in the College’s department of clinical and administrative sciences and an associate professor at the Medical College of Georgia School of Medicine.
“The initial projections for the use of MAP’s services have been exceeded and the demand for service continues to grow,” says Chisholm. “Acquisition of free medications for patients in MAP currently exceeds $80,000 per month. This new grant will allow MAP to increase medication access to more Georgians, to purchase more operating supplies and equipment and to hire additional personnel.”
MAP also publishes a monthly newsletter to educate patients and health-care professionals about medication usage and clinical issues of interest to the transplant community, such as diuretics versus alpha-blockers for hypertension and the use of ACE inhibitors in renal-transplant patients. |
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