Nursing Home of the Future Lab Takes on Challenges, Opportunities in Medication Management

Posted by Melissa Withers on March 26, 2009

Soon after BIF launched the Nursing Home of the Future (NHoF) laboratory, medication (and the management of that medication) clearly emerged as a part of elder living that has a big impact on quality of life.

There’s a lot we don’t know about how people get, take and manage their medications—it is an area of our lives that most keep very personal. The same is true for many elders and aging Americans who work hard to keep their prescription and over the counter drug routines maximized for safety and effectiveness.

So while there is much we don’t know about these very personal routines, we do know that successful management of medication is vital to health and wellness. Managing medications can be difficult and confusing for everyone and a great deal of focus has been placed on developing products and systems that help people take the right medicines, at the right time and in the right way.

We also know the people with especially complicated medication regimes have come up with thousands of ways to manage medication—from novel ways to store and take their meds to excel spreadsheets and logbooks that bring order to an otherwise confusing routine.

Helping elders and aging people manage medications is an important part of helping people maximize the effectiveness of drug therapies and minimize the risks of side effects.

Our work in the NHoF lab has shown us that there is room for improvement in the medication management arena. We think it is a perfect opportunity to take a systems-level view of the current "medication management” experience and to accelerate the design and development of new solutions that help more elders safely maintain their independence and empower care givers and families to better assist elders who need support with managing their medication regime.

The NHoF team has created "modules" of activity in the lab devoted to areas of the elder experience most deeply in need of new solutions.  In March, the team launched a Medication Management module to better understand the experience elders have as they manage their medications and begin work to design and develop new solutions that make the process work and feel better for elders and those that support them.

The lab kicked off the medication management module with work to understand how elders currently manage their medications. We believe that to truly transform the elder medication management experience we need to more deeply understand the full experience, beginning with when an elder is prescribed a medication all the way through the process of storing and taking that medication all the way to how a drug therapy is evaluated and reordered. 

The team began work this month to begin to answer important questions about how elders at all stages of their lives and those living at varying degrees of full independence acquire, store, consume, order, understand and talk about medication. This activity includes focus groups with caretakers who assist elders, workshops with elders about their experience with medications, and design sessions where elders can share their ideas for improving the current system. The team is also working with staff from assisted living and nursing home environments to understand medication management from the perspective of those who support elders day-to-day.

Like all work in the NHoF lab, the most rewarding part of the process is empowering elders to share their personal perspectives about what works well, what doesn’t, and how the overall experience can be improved.

We look forward to sharing our findings with the community in weeks to come.

We are also excited to announce that in April we will be opening an on-line forum for community members to get directly engaged in lab activities…so stay tuned!