The Challenges of Treating Patients with HCV Acquired From Injection Drug Use

Achilles Alon, PharmD, RPh, director of Specialty Pharmacy, co-owner of ACE-Rx Specialty Pharmacy, discusses some of the challenges in treating patients who acquired hepatitis C virus from injection drug use.

Achilles Alon: Those are particularly challenging. Their past with, you know, abusive drugs distracts them from being able to treat their HCV well. So, one of the biggest challenges is actually keeping a consistent communication path with them, and the reason why we need that communication path is to ensure that their taking their medications and are compliant, but we also have to make sure that we monitor for side effects and make sure that their going back to their doctor in order to get their blood tests to see if their viral is reducing.

If we don’t have that consistent communication path then things start to break down. So, I think patients that have had addiction problems in the past are also still dealing with that and are distracted with that, and sometimes it’s hard to keep that communication going.