Senior citizens might be a lot happier-not to mention healthier and maybe even a little wealthier-if health-care providers and insurers stopped focusing exclusively on costs of prescriptions and instead looked closely at why patients take so many medications in the first place.

This approach to managing a patient's drug regimen-called pharmaceutical therapy management-could cut health-care costs and lead to seniors living independently for longer periods of time, according to Wayne K. Anderson, dean of the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Pharmaceutical therapy management is the foundation of a new program in geriatric pharmacotherapy in the pharmacy school designed to improve pharmaceutical management of seniors by training new pharmacists who would be involved exclusively in the health care of older patients and conducting research on how pharmacotherapy can enhance and extend the lives of older patients.

"Our goal is to develop programs that allow independent senior citizens to continue to live independently, even though they have a number of medical conditions and as a consequence take a good number of drugs," Anderson said.

According to Anderson, senior citizens in the United States age 65 and older take an average of six to eight prescription drugs daily.

"That's probably too many," he said. "Proper pharmaceutical therapy management probably could cut in half the number of drugs most senior citizens now are taking so the amount of money they are spending is reduced and the quality of their lives is much improved."

Anderson said that most senior citizens see several doctors, each of whom may prescribe a medication based on symptoms the patient is experiencing.

"Different physicians use different drugs to treat different conditions," he said, "and some of these drugs interact, in some cases exacerbating the side effects of other drugs that are being taken for other conditions."

Statistically, a person taking eight drugs can expect at least one drug interaction that will have a negative effect on his health, Anderson said.

These outcomes not only compromise the patient's health, but may lead to much higher health-care costs that are entirely avoidable, said Anderson.

He noted that national data from the American Association of Consultant Pharmacists suggest that 25 percent of admissions to nursing homes result from failed drug regimens, noncompliance by patients, drug interactions, inappropriate medications being prescribed for certain conditions and the lack of good therapeutic monitoring.

"There often is no single physician who is looking at the patient's entire health picture and who can ask, 'Why is this person taking so many drugs?'" he explained.

That's where pharmacists can make an invaluable contribution, said Anderson.

"Pharmacists are uniquely positioned to function as a patient's drug advocate," he explained. "With proper pharmaceutical therapy management, the pharmacist, together with the patient and the physician, could re-examine the drug that was prescribed for the initial condition to see if an alternative drug or some combination of other drugs would have a similar therapeutic effect without adversely affecting the patient," said Anderson. "If that's possible, then all but one of the drugs prescribed in that scenario were completely unnecessary."

This type of pharmacy management will be a main principle of the training of pharmacists in the new program in geriatric pharmacotherapy, graduates of which will practice in hospitals, nursing homes and community pharmacies.