Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefit management organization, “has collected 22 petabytes of healthcare data from 83 million patients. To give an idea of scale, if this amount of data were converted into an MP3 format, the music file would take approximately 44,000 years to listen to.”

What could pharmacies possibly be doing with that huge amount of data? Some very useful stuff, as it turns out! Pharmacies are using healthcare data to reduce prescription drug abuse, save money, and improve healthcare research.

Reduce prescription drug abuse

The instructions on the back of that little orange bottle? They’re pretty important. As the United States faces an opioid epidemic, it’s become clear that your pharmacy’s instructions shouldn’t be taken lightly. On top of causing the deaths of almost 218,000 people from 1999 to 2017, non-compliance “is also taking a large financial toll on healthcare in the U.S. . . . Non-adherence was estimated to cost the U.S. approximately $290 billion, which equated to about 13 percent of total spending on healthcare nationwide, or of 2.3 percent of GDP.”

Pharmacies can use data to…

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