A Partnership for the Future of Health Care

Drug Safety

Adverse drug events, such as prescribing potentially inappropriate medications or those resulting in harmful drug-on-drug interactions, are a major cause of avoidable morbidity, mortality and health care expenditures. Medications can be considered inappropriate when their risk outweighs their benefit. Because older adults often take more medications than younger adults, the incidence of adverse drug reactions increases with age. According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, more than 50 percent of adults aged 57 to 85 in the United States use five or more prescription or over-the-counter drugs, and about 4 percent of them are at risk of death from possible interactions among them.

Improving drug safety across diverse provider settings (hospitals, physician offices, nursing homes, home health agencies, managed care plans and prescription drug plans) is a focus for NMMRA as part of its Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) patient safety work under its Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Ninth Scope of Work (9SOW). As part of 9SOW activities, NMMRA is providing individualized quality improvement consultation and technical assistance to providers in the areas of potentially inappropriate medications and drug-on-drug interactions.

NMMRA also aims to address requirements of the 9SOW in part through its involvement in the New Mexico Prescription Improvement Coalition (NMPIC) and New Mexico Medication Therapy Management (MTM) Collaborative. NMPIC is a group effort aimed at reducing the negative health effects associated with inappropriate drug treatment in Medicare beneficiaries. It serves New Mexico’s community interest through education, clinical guidelines for appropriate treatment of people with chronic disease and drug utilization. The MTM Collaborative is aimed at improving outcomes for people with diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia and congestive heart failure, with its primary objective being to assess the impact of face-to-face MTM on adherence of medications used to treat the specified conditions.