Patient Behavior

The Role of Patient Behavior

Going against doctor’s orders—whether intentional or unintentional—puts the patient’s health in jeopardy and adds unnecessary costs to our healthcare system.

Unfortunately, doctors and pharmacists can only do so much. They can give their assessments of what the health problem is, and make their recommendations for how to correct it, but it’s the responsibility of the patient to follow through with that counsel. Patients always intend to do the right thing to improve their health—that’s why they visited the doctor in the first place—but it’s not always so simple.

The Power of Patient Behavior
Patient behavior has the power to keep health on track—or completely derail it. The goal of Express Scripts is to apply behavioral science to turn good patient intentions into optimal patient behavior—and thus, the best possible patient health.

At Express Scripts, we believe that it’s critically important to have a clear understanding of patient behavior from all scientific perspectives and apply that to health. We’re interested in where people get their medications, which medications they get, and how that and other factors affect whether they take their medications as prescribed.

In this section, we’ll be discussing research on human behavior from across the behavioral sciences in order to better understand how to make it easy for people to choose better health.