Advocate Health expands free medication program to combat health disparities
ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. - Advocate Health and the Dispensary of Hope are tackling health disparities by providing free prescription medications to uninsured hospital patients upon discharge, ensuring critical access to care for those facing financial difficulties.
The program offers a lifeline to patients who would otherwise be forced to decide between paying for their prescription or providing for their family. This financial burden often causes community members to skip their medications or avoid filling them altogether.
Advocate Health is working to bridge that gap by sending lifesaving prescriptions directly to patients’ doorsteps—for free.
Announced last month, Advocate Health has partnered with the dispensary, which is a charitable medication distributor.
The nonprofit receives medication donations from drug manufacturers and works to get them into the hands of low-income and uninsured patients.
Currently, patients who meet program requirements and are hospitalized at Advocate Trinity Hospital on the city’s South Side or Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center on the North Side can access free prescriptions for up to 90 days upon discharge.
Advocate Health is working to expand its new partnership to additional hospital campuses, too.
"The patient that would qualify for the Dispensary of Hope, they must meet a federal poverty level of 300 percent or below, they must have no insurance, and we simply ask that they complete an attestation indicating those facts to be true," said Tasha Williams, director of medication access for Advocate Health.
Once accepted into the program, patients receive their medications by mail the next day.
On Thursday, FOX 32 Chicago was given behind-the-scenes access to Advocate Health's pharmacy distribution center in Arlington Heights, where the free medications are filled.
Williams told us about a recent interaction with a patient who benefited from the program.
"She broke down and cried after she first indicated that this couldn’t be real," Williams said. "She informed me that she wasn’t sure how she was going to be able to afford her insulin when she left the hospital, and that was her reason for being admitted to the hospital, was because she did run out of insulin."
Williams also shared an alarming statistic—a gap this program is working to close.
"Many of our South Side patients tend to live 30 years less than our North Side patients, and so with that being the case, many of them, about 85 percent of them have more than one chronic condition as well. By implementing the Dispensary of Hope into Advocate Health, this is helping those patients live those healthier lives," Williams explained. "These are lifesaving medications for patients that may not have the ability or may even have to make a choice between their medications as well as providing for their families."
The Dispensary of Hope operates with health system partners throughout United States.
Patients who do not qualify for medications through the Dispensary of Hope might be eligible for other options through Advocate Health’s robust prescription assistance programs, Williams added. More information can be found here.