Having medication is not the same as taking medication
Thoughts on the WSJ article “Pharmacies Flood Medicare Patients With $3 Billion of Extra Drugs” from 12/26/25
We’ve gotten remarkably good at getting medications to the doorstep. Mail order, same-day delivery, auto-refills—logistics are no longer the hard part.
But there’s an uncomfortable truth hiding in plain sight: having medication is not the same as taking medication. The Wall Street Journal recently documented how automated refill systems can lead to patients accumulating piles of extra pills—sometimes refills arriving before prior supplies are finished—creating confusion, waste, and real safety risk.
That gap—delivery vs. ingestion—is where outcomes are won or lost. Or as Dr Everett Koop, former U.S. Surgeon General put it: “For meds to work, people actually have to take them.”
When medications show up early, duplicate, or in large quantities, patients don’t experience “convenience”—they experience complexity. More bottles, more dates, more chances to miss doses, double dose, or abandon a regimen entirely. The WSJ reporting underscored what clinicians see every day: surplus pills can increase confusion and medication errors, especially for people managing multiple prescriptions.
RedCap flips the experience from “a bottle on the counter” to a simple daily system:
Clarity: Patients can immediately see whether today’s dose has been taken.
Consistency: Habit beats intention. RedCap turns dosing into a repeatable routine.
Confidence: Less guesswork for patients and caregivers, fewer “Did I take it?” moments.
This matters because adherence is not a niche problem. Across chronic conditions, research has long found that adherence commonly averages around ~50%—meaning even “great” drugs often don’t deliver real-world results.
For pharmacies, manufacturers, payers, and providers, the industry’s default response to nonadherence has often been more outreach, more reminders, more shipping. But the WSJ story illustrates a core failure mode: systems can optimize for “medication possession” while patients still don’t take the meds.
RedCap helps companies move from a distribution mindset to an outcomes mindset:
Better real-world effectiveness: When patients take therapies as prescribed, clinical value shows up in actual lives—not just trial data.
Stronger trust and retention: Patients don’t quit brands—they quit confusing regimens. RedCap reduces friction, which reduces drop-off.
Lower avoidable costs: When adherence improves, downstream costs from complications and preventable escalations fall—benefiting every stakeholder exposed to total cost of care.
In short: delivery is table stakes. Outcomes are the differentiator.
Medication nonadherence doesn’t just hurt the individual patient—it creates a ripple effect:
more complications,
more avoidable acute events,
more wasted medication,
more strain on caregivers and clinicians.
And when extra medication accumulates, society inherits additional risks—diversion, unsafe storage, and disposal problems—on top of pure financial waste. The WSJ reporting on surplus shipments highlights how quickly “convenience” can turn into a public-health and system-efficiency problem.
RedCap is a simple idea with a big societal implication: make taking medication easier than not taking it. If we want healthcare to be sustainable, we can’t only innovate in the supply chain. We have to innovate in the last six inches—from the bottle to the mouth.
Because the point isn’t getting meds to the door.
The point is getting meds to work.
