A (Global) Cornucopia Of Clues To Optimize Medication Use

The most common patient care intervention, issuing a prescription, is fraught with continuing challenges for patients, their caregivers, and practitioners. Patients rely on medications across a continuum of care, with expectations for self-management; some experience unintended problems along the way. For older patients, such problems often result in emergency hospitalizations, many of which could be prevented. Historically, integration to support safe and appropriate medicine use across the U.S. health care ecosystem has been sporadic, including within our siloed Medicare Part D benefit. Other countries, however, are well on their way to better integration. In the following blog post, we share examples from the United Kingdom and Australia. Fortunately, U.S. practitioners who recognize optimizing medication use as an essential element of population health can look to several recent federal opportunities to support their efforts. This includes the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) request-for-information (now closed) on health plan innovation that invited collaboration between accountable care organizations (ACOs) and Medicare Part D drug plans; the 10-year evaluation of the Medicare Coordinated Care Demonstration; the National Institute on Aging’s R01 grant on self-management for health in chronic conditions; Medicare’s 2015 physician payment rules; and CMMI’s Transforming Clinical Practices Initiative, an $840 million grant opportunity. Although the...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: All Categories Global Health Health Care Costs Health Care Delivery Pharma Policy Public Health Source Type: blogs