Up to 1 in 4 Patients Skip Oral Cancer Drugs on Costs

A contributing factor could have been that some of the patients decided not to buy the drugs after hearing their side-effects, he acknowledged.

Of all the patients, the study found, "10% of patients abandoned their anticancer medicine and another quarter had some delay in initiating another oncolytic," the researchers said. They added that the amount of a pharmacy plan's required cost-sharing to purchase those drugs, and the complexity of the drug therapy were "significant drivers" of the patients not taking filling their prescriptions.

The researchers said that the more drugs the patients took for other conditions, the more likely they were to decline co-payments for expensive cancer medication prescriptions.

"Patients with more than five claims for non-cancer medicines in the previous month had an abandonment rate of 12%, as compared to 9% for patients with no claims in the previous month," the report said.

Having lower levels of income and being on Medicare were also associated with higher rates of abandonment.

"The results of this study highlight the importance of indentifying strategies to minimize the impact of high cost-sharing requirements in prescription drug plans so that they do not pose a barrier to access to newer oral therapies for patients diagnosed with cancer, thereby denying patients the potential benefits of these effective agents."

The research was funded by The Community Oncology Alliance in partnership with Celgene, Genentech, Millennium, Novartis, and Pfizer.