In a world where pharmaceutical companies produce and push a dizzying array of medications and over-the-counter remedies, navigating all of it can be confusing, even risky. This challenge becomes even more daunting for older adults, who often face multiple health conditions, see different doctors, and juggle a variety of healthcare providers and treatment plans.
InnovAge LIFE – the largest provider of the Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) – is designed to empower seniors to age independently in their homes and communities. InnovAge knows that good medication management can be crucial to elders, families, and caretakers. At InnovAge, there are teams of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other care team members, working together to unpack often complicated medication regimens, and determine the best, most appropriate plan for each individual.
All medications are managed by the InnovAge teams, pre-packaged in daily doses, sent to enrolled seniors’ homes, and continuously monitored. This can result in seniors taking fewer medications and less frequently, as duplicative, or conflicting medications are reduced.
“When patients join the InnovAge program, they are often on many medications – 10, 12, or more – and have many medical problems they are trying to balance all at once,” says InnovAge Colorado PACE-North Center Director Dr. Melissa Rathmell. “We have a team of people – not just primary care doctors, but nurses, and expert geriatrician pharmacists – who can look at those medications, and help (our participants) figure what they need, what’s maybe no longer necessary, what we can ramp down, and how we can reduce side effects so they can live better.”
InnovAge Clinical Pharmacist Cassidy Putman adds to Rathmell’s summation that there are many times when participants “are taking multiples of the same drug class, because one doctor didn’t know that the other one had already provided it. We see a lot of that. We also see a lot of medications that interact with one another because the medication lists don’t match up. The really nice part of InnovAge is that you can streamline all of that. It all flows through one place, one care team, and one doctor. That way, we always know that the med lists are not full of duplicates or interacting medications.”
Take the case of Deanna, an InnovAge Colorado PACE participant, and Ralph, her husband and caregiver.
“When we would go from doctor to doctor to doctor, it was challenging,” says Ralph. “Deanna had a pain medication doctor and a regular primary care doctor. They would give her (various) medications and she would take it three or four times a day.”
Rathmell says that before Deanna came to InnovAge, she was being treated for a number of health issues, including a chronic pain syndrome, and was on a series of medications that made her drowsy.
“These medications gave her a lot of brain fog. She was falling a lot because of that. She was wheelchair bound and had difficulty staying awake during the day.”
“Some days I was so fatigued and tired. It was kind of like being alive but not being alive,” says Deanna, who has been enrolled in InnovAge for over a year.
“When she started working with us, Deanna was able to start getting her life back,” says Rathmell, crediting the valuable impact of good medical management.
“InnovAge doctors look at you as a whole body, so they nurture to everything about you, and help you grow back into wholeness,” says Deanna. “That’s where I feel I’m at now. I feel like I’m finally back to wholeness.”
“When somebody has a lot of medical problems that affect their brain and activity, for family, it feels like you are losing them before you lose them, says Rathmell. “To be able to bring his wife back, to see the joy in his eyes when he looks at her, knowing that we helped bring her back to him, is amazing.”
“Thank you,” says Ralph to those at InnovAge responsible for managing his wife’s medication. “Thank you for everything.”
Sponsored content produced in partnership with InnovAge
