Medication management in older adults: What a systematic review tells us

Abstract

While the original goal of a systematic review is to evaluate interventions to improve care, the systematic review related to medication management highlighted the lack of research performed in this area. The original goal of this systematic review was to evaluate interventions to improve medication error incidence rates in an older population (≥65 years). However, the majority of studies did not direct interventions to this population, and therefore the evidence contained in this discussion is obtained largely from the general adult population. Overall, however, for a number of the interventions discussed in this review, the level of evidence was low (small sample sizes, before and after studies) or the results poorly reported or inconclusive. Another note of caution is that the definition and the severity of a medication error (e.g., life threatening vs minor), varied from trial to trial and was not always reported. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.