Gift Cards as Incentive to Take Medication

As I was researching new gift card articles and news this morning, I was flabbergasted when I read this article from the Boston Globe. Unbelievably, researchers and healthcare providers are trying out a new idea to get patients to take their medication; offering gift card incentives.

The bounties are small — $20 gift cards to restaurants, a chance to win between $10 and $100 in a lottery — but they seem to work. Clinics and researchers report that patients who were paid to take their drugs had better compliance and stayed on top of their appointments.

I thought I'd seen it all, but this takes the cake. There are problems on many levels with this concept, and the main one I see is that we must question why there are so many people who are not taking the medications they are prescribed in the first place. Could it be that the side effects of the medication are almost as bad as the suffering from the original ailment? We've all seen the commercials for drugs that end with a laundry list of side effects. It's no wonder the patient is hesitant to take the medication that could cause him to; have a seizure, headaches, nausea, dizziness, and the list of side effects goes on and on, almost becoming comic. In fact, show like Saturday Night Live have actually performed skits involving this very problem.

Besides, most old people don't refuse to take their medication, they forget! So how is offering them a gift card going to help?

What do you think? Do you believe it's a wise decision to offer gift cards to patients as an incentive to take their medication? Or do you think, as suggested in the Boston Globe article, that a better idea might be a call to the pharmacy to make sure the patient filled their medication, or follow up calls to the patient themselves? Sounds like a lot better solution to me, but I'd like to hear from you.