From the Lown Institute report: Eliminating Medication Overload
The Lown Institute is a non-partisan American group that strives to create a health system that rejects low-value care, incentivizes healing over profits, promotes health equity, and honors the value of the clinician-patient relationship.
They have brought together like-thinkers to create the Right Care Alliance, host a conference on the theme of over treatment, contributed to the landmark Lancet 2017 series on overdiagnosis/overtreatment, and have now worked with partners to develop a National Action Plan on Eliminating Medication Overload.
I work with one of the endorsing organizations, the Therapeutics Initiative, a group at the University of British Columbia that offers non-conflicted critical appraisal of evidence and knowledge translation. Much of our work focusses on polypharmacy, deprescribing, and finding ways to teach and empower clinicians to do this work (like feeding-back prescribing data in individual Prescriber Portraits).
Given the alignment in goals, I’m excited to see this Action Plan from the Lown Institute come to fruition; it is aimed at policymakers, health care institutions, clinicians, and patients and provides some tangible ways that we can reduce harm from polypharmacy.
You can DOWNLOAD the plan here [PDF] or read a bit more on the website.
*Spoiler alert* there are 5 main categories to consider:
Implement prescription checkups
Raise awareness about medication overload
Improve information at the point of care
Educate and train health professionals to reduce medication overload
Reduce industry influence
Which do you think is the most important? What are you focussed on?