Month: July 2017

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Medication Therapy Management in Home Care

    Imagine waking up in the morning and remembering that it is time to take your morning pills. You open your pill box and look at a handful of pills, mostly white, with a few peach or blue ones mixed in. Some of the pills are prescribed by your cardiologist, some by your endocrinologist, a few by your psychiatrist, and the rest by your primary care doctor. You wonder if all these medications are okay to take together, and if each of your doctors knows what the others are prescribing, but you take your morning handful anyway. Two hours later, as you are getting out of the shower, you suddenly feel light headed and the next thing you know you’re waking up on the floor of the bathroom with a tremendous pain in your hip and leg. How could you have helped prevent this from happening?

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    Recover Health’s Medication Therapy Management (MTM) is a program that is designed to make sure that you are taking the best possible medications to treat your conditions. It allows a patient to talk with a clinical pharmacist who is an expert in drug therapy and interactions and discuss all of the medications that you take, prescription and over the counter, as well as vitamins and supplements. This is called a Comprehensive Medication Review, or CMR.
    During your CMR, the clinical pharmacist will review all of your medications with you and ensure that you are taking them as prescribed, then look for interactions or side effects of medications that may cause problems, such as falls. Our pharmacists also check to see how well conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and others are controlled by asking about your symptoms and checking your medical records. Our pharmacists also ensure that every medication that you are taking is necessary, as sometimes medications are left active when they are no longer needed.
    At the end of your CMR, the clinical pharmacist makes recommendations to your doctors, and also provides you with some information that you can use to better manage your medications. We also share this information with your Recover Health nurse, which allows us to better provide care to you.
    Recover Health has committed to offer this important service to our home health care patients in order to ensure that patients are taking the best medications possible, while decreasing the risk of side effects and interactions. MTM has been shown to be associated with less hospital readmissions, better management of chronic health conditions, and even lowering mortality. We are focused on providing the best possible care to our patients, and this program is another example of how we are always looking for new ways to be a leader in home health care.