FDB and Polyglot Systems Partner to Help Improve Medication Adherence

First Databank (FDB), a provider of clinical drug knowledge that helps improve medication-related decisions and patient outcomes,has entered into an agreement with Polyglot Systems to be the primary distributor of Polyglot’s proprietary Meducation® simplified patient medication instructions to the hospital, ambulatory, and pharmacy markets in the United States and Canada.

Meducation is a cloud-based solution, accessible to healthcare providers within their clinical workflow via their EMR system or as a standalone solution, which delivers medication instructions for individuals considered to be “high risk” due to low health literacy, impaired vision and language barriers. It enables providers to dynamically create fully personalized medication patient instructions, in any of 21 languages — written at a 5th to 8th grade reading level with large font sizes, pictograms and videos — to make understanding how to take medications intuitive and simple. Meducation will complement the company’s existing portfolio of consumer and professional medication education monographs offered through FDB MedKnowledge™.

“Since one-in-three Americans are either low health literate or have limited English proficiency, offering simplified instructions in multiple languages and easy-to-understand formats will help to increase medication adherence and patient satisfaction,” said Chuck Tuchinda, MD, MBA, president of FDB. “We are focused on providing innovative solutions that improve health outcomes and reduce healthcare costs and our agreement with Polyglot Systems significantly advances this mission.”

Key provisions in the Affordable Care Act require hospitals to demonstrate high patient satisfaction as measured by HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) scores, or forfeit a certain percentage of their Medicare reimbursement. John Dempsey Hospital, part of the University of Connecticut Health Center, saw vast improvement in their HCAHPS scores after adopting Meducation. Additionally, a health literacy study on medication adherence conducted in 2014 at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Durham, NC, concluded that Meducation positively affected medication adherence and clinical outcomes for high-risk patients with cardiovascular disease.

“Our partnership with FDB means that the majority of hospitals and pharmacies, and thousands of physician practices in the US and Canada that use FDB’s drug knowledge will now have easy access to the Meducation solution,” said Polyglot CEO, Sims Preston. “We are delighted that FDB recognizes the value that Meducation offers in addressing the needs of underserved populations as a complement to their extensive drug education information already widely available.”