FLASCO Wants to Hear Your Step Therapy Story
FLASCO Wants To Hear Your Step Therapy Story
FLASCO is working with other health care organizations to encourage Florida lawmakers to address the negative impact of Step Therapy policies. We are currently looking for stories about barriers and challenges to navigating Step Therapy and fail-first policies to share with the media. If you have any stories you would like to share, please contact the FLASCO Executive Director at: Dorothy.Green@flasco.org
As health care providers, you see people every day who are struggling with diagnoses that are scary, difficult and sometimes life threatening. They will rely on you to provide them with the best treatment plans possible, based on a full evaluation, their medical history and your professional experience.
In the perfect world, you would provide your recommendations and they could follow your treatment plans. Unfortunately, because of a process called Step Therapy, there’s a third party involved that may make the final decisions about which treatments your patients are able to access.
Step Therapy is a practice used by insurance companies that requires patients to try and fail on specific medications before accessing the treatment prescribed by their doctors. Basically this is someone who hasn’t been in the exam room and doesn’t know your patient who is making the final treatment decision.
We’ve seen this process have extremely negative effects on the patient’s ability to control his or her illness and its symptoms. Imagine their frustration in knowing that there was a medication that could have treated their disease better, but could not get access to it until they could prove that other drugs would not help them – possibly making them sicker in the process.
The diagnosis of a chronic or life threatening illness can take so many things away from patients. Don’t let the right treatment plan become one of those things. Speak out against Step Therapy. It could be as simple as sharing your story as a provider or asking your patients to share theirs, but please start today. You can be both their anchor and their advocate.
