Are you going to be a good boy and take your medicine? Next time your Mom won’t have to ask you. She can just check your FICO Medication Adherence Score. The same people who make the standard credit scoring model have turned their data mining drills and abacuses onto medicine. They’re selling a new score that says can predict if you will take your medication correctly.

The score is on a range of 0 to 500. Over 400, and you’re probably going to follow instructions. Under 200, and you’re a risk for not taking your medication correctly. You might not get the prescription ever filled, forget to pick up your drugs from the pharmacy, not take all your doses, take your pills at the wrong time of day, or either over or under-dose.

FICO got data on a random sample of 600,000 anonymous patients who had diabetes, heart disease and asthma from a large pharmacy benefits manager. They then used publicly available data, like home ownership and job status, to tease out the risk factors that impacted how well people followed their medication instructions.

For instance, people who have been in a home or job for a short period of time are less likely to take their medicine correctly. People who aren’t married or live alone are at a higher risk for skipping doses or not getting their prescriptions filled.

“We started thinking about how do consumers behave as patients,” the CEO of FICO told NYT. “The problem, from a math standpoint, is not all that different from banking and other industries.”

FICO says it plans on selling the score to doctors and insurance companies to better target which patients should receive followup calls and reminders to make sure they’re taking their medicine.

Keeping Score on How You Take Your Medicine [NYT]

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