CVS/Caremark wants consumers to take their medicine!

In CVS/Caremark's most recent press release, the company describes its new partnership with research to find out why patients don't take their medication. This new research will go towards CVS' current and future intiatives and communciations strategies to reach consumers with the information.

The research, done in collaboration with Minds at Work of Cambridge, MA, set out to discover why so many patients decide to stop taking their medication against their doctors' orders. The research findings were collected through "hour long, 'hidden-motivation' interviews" to find out why patients put the cap on their pill bottle for good.

The results of the research were quite interesting and it will be a PR success for CVS if they can create a successful campaign from this research that promotes the importance of following the prescription advice of doctors. The most common reason for not taking medicine was that people felt that medications "interfered with their lives."

I think it'd be a great opportunity for CVS to launch a PR campaign geared towards education people on medication plans on how to integrate their medications into their daily lives. This campaign would be successful if it could teach consumers how to make medication a simple part of their daily routine -- not another time-consuming chore.

Another way that CVS could use this research to improve their relatiionship with

consumers is to create a campaign that builds consumers' trust in health professionals. Another reas

on that consumers stop taking medicine, the survey shows, is that "they feel that they know better than their doctors what [is] good for them."

In my opinion, CVS has hit a homerun in sponsoring this research. I'm going to keep checking up on CVS/Caremark's press releases and see if their public relations professionals are the same page.