AmeliaTek Medication Compliance

When the doctors followed Medicare patients for a year, they witnessed 129 adverse events caused by patient errors. In half of those cases, the patient error was made after a doctor had changed the medication schedule, medication, or dosage. Also, patients taking 4 or more drugs were twice as likely to make mistakes. Patients on 7 or more medications were 3 times as likely to make mistakes. Among the most common underlying causes for patient error? Confusion, and sensory problems.

One common observation: when a new drug replaced an old drug, patients would take the new drug but at the old prescribed amount. This could and sometimes did have serious medical consequences.

What we can learn from this:

• Medication compliance is important
• Patient errors are costly, and more costly as we get older
• Patient compliance depends on cognitive factors! Safety is not just about the drugs!

We can do better! :

• Use mental reminders and medication reminder systems like OnCellRx to keep things on track and prevent us from making mistakes
• We need more attention paid to the process of prescribing and re-prescribing medications, to prevent PATIENT errors

It seems to me, if we can see what the problem is, we should be able to fix it:

“Patients taking 4 or more drugs were twice as likely to make mistakes; patients on 7 or more drugs were three times as likely to make mistakes”

Patients with these conditions and multiple medications require special attention to help manage the more complex schedules.  Why aren’t they getting the help they need?

“The most common underlying cause for patient error? Dementia, confusion, and sensory problems.”

Why can’t patients with these conditions and multiple medications get special attention to help manage the more complex schedules?

Baby Boomers and their peers are more and more tech-savvy these days, with cell phones and organizers and smart phones. It’s so easy to add a medication manager system to a personal organizer, and even easier to sign on to a web-based medication reminder system that sends automated alerts to an ordinary cell phone.

It’s great to see more research findings, but it would be even better to see more action taken based on the findings. Big pharma. has the most to gain, and the most resources to make a positive difference.  When are they going to step up to the plate and provide real compliance tools so everyone benefits?

Source:  A Reuters report on Yahoo about a study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, February 2007

From the abstract :

OBJECTIVES: To characterize the types of patient-related errors that lead to adverse drug events (ADEs) and identify patients at high risk of such errors. DESIGN: A subanalysis within a cohort study of Medicare enrollees. SETTING: A large multispecialty group practice. PARTICIPANTS: Thirty thousand Medicare enrollees followed over a 12-month period. MEASUREMENTS: Primary outcomes were ADEs, defined as injuries due to a medication, and potential ADEs, defined as medication errors with the potential to cause an injury. The subset of these events that were related to patient errors was identified. RESULTS: The majority of patient errors leading to adverse events (n=129) occurred in administering the medication (31.8%), modifying the medication regimen (41.9%), or not following clinical advice about medication use (21.7%). Patient-related errors most often involved hypoglycemic medications (28.7%), cardiovascular medications (21.7%), anticoagulants (18.6%), or diuretics (10.1%). Patients with medication errors did not differ from a comparison group in age or sex but were taking more regularly scheduled medications (compared with 0-2 medications, odds ratio (OR) for 3-4 medications=2.0, 95% confidence interval (CI)=0.9-4.2; OR for 5-6 medications=3.1, 95% CI=1.5-7.0; OR for >/=7 medications=3.3, 95% CI=1.5-7.0).