Work With Older Patients on Polypharmacy, Experts Say

The Indiana University Center for Aging Research's Noll Campbell and University of California, San Francisco Professor Michael Steinman recommend that doctors work with older patients to prevent the negative effects of polypharmacy, or taking multiple prescription medications, reports Healio . Steinman said building reminder tools into electronic health records to discuss drugs with patients is often insufficient, and he noted that "many of those are perceived as useless or annoying." Meanwhile, patient participation in medication management may increase when doctors add a medication review as an item on their problem list. Steinman stressed that avoiding polypharmacy is "not just about having medication information recorded somewhere," but also "about accessing patients' information on a regular basis and structuring it into the workflow during patient assessments." According to Campbell, scheduling visits dedicated exclusively to medication review, using team-based care models, and providing patients with educational resources may remove time barriers. He advised physicians to "use support personnel who have more frequent interactions with patients to identify what is important to the patient, how the patient is feeling, and what are their priorities" every three to six months.