How to approach better medication management

The numbers are staggering—more than 10,000 prescription medications on the market, with many patients on more than one medication at a time (PSNet, 2019). According to a recent study by the Get the Medications Right Institute (GTMRx), nearly a quarter of the patients surveyed said their medical team did not regularly review their medications, despite a third of the respondents saying they were currently taking four or more medications (GTMRx, 2021b).

The opportunity for error grows from there: One in five said they were prescribed medications by three or more physicians in the past year (GTMRx, 2021b). Healthcare leaders have identified lack of communication between prescribers and pharmacists as a major challenge in medication management (GTMRx, 2021a). But how do we improve this situation?

“We have an explosion of life-saving medications,” says Katherine H. Capps, co-founder and executive director of GTMRx. “Also 80% of how we treat and prevent illness is with medications. But multiple medications prescribed by multiple physicians to treat multiple conditions is a huge area of risk.” That’s a finding echoed in the medical literature, including a recent study in Annals of Pharmacotherapy (Watanabe et al., 2018).

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