Saving health, money with 'medicine checkups'

Hays County — Doing a routine “medicine checkup” could save you hundreds of dollars, put an end to the endless barrage of pill bottles and ultimately keep your health and wellbeing in check.

Jodie Pepin, clinical pharmacy director at Harbor Health and clinical assistant professor of pharmacy at the University of Texas at Austin, explained that while medicine checkup may not be a wellknown term, it is still important.

These checkups entail patients meeting with a pharmacist to discuss any and all prescribed or over-the-counter medications, as well as vitamins and supplements, they’re taking to ensure there are no medication errors that could lead to dangerous drug interactions.

“‘Medication errors’ sounds so ominous, but it happens so often and it’s a very huge reason that patients get admitted or readmitted into hospitals,” Pepin said. “It costs the healthcare system a lot of money, but it’s always preventable.”

During a medicine checkup, pharmacists can educate patients on their medication and how to take it correctly. According to Pepin, statistics show that about half of all patients do not take their medicine as prescribed, saying that mistakes can all be made at the provider level when prescribing, the pharmacy level when filling and the patient level if they misunderstand key drug interactions.

For example, taking something as a sleep aid (like Benadryl, which has Diphenhydramine) while also taking medications like Gabapentin or Lyrica (pregabalin) for nerve pain management can negatively interact and potentially result in trauma such as blood clots or an increase in sedation effects, which could cause dizziness, drowsiness and falls.

Even something as minor as a vitamin and supplement can interact negatively with certain medications.

“There’s tons,” Pepin said. “Almost every drug has at least one or [more than] 10 interactions,” Pepin said.

“It’s all based on pharmacodynamics, or the kinetics of a drug.”

Pepin noted that aside from preventing dangerous drug interactions, medicine checkups can also help decrease the amount of medications being taken, as well as find less expensive alternatives — both of which would ultimately lower healthcare costs.

Pepin said that many times, older patients who take a variety of daily medications aren’t always sure of what it is they’re exactly taking or why. Many times these patients can fall victim to polypharmacy, or the simultaneous use of multiple medications to treat a single condition.

So, how often should you and your loved ones get medicine checkups to ensure you’re getting the least expensive but most effective deal?

“At least annually [but] every six months would be great, more so when there’s a new prescription on file or during transitional care,” Pepin said. “For example, when a patient is discharged, they come home with a medication list and new prescriptions, but it could be a duplicative of what they’re already taking at home. It was given because it was the formulary agent for that drug class at the hospital, but since they’re already taking that at home, that could be very harmful.”

In fact, drug medication errors from transitional care account for billions of dollars of healthcare costs, Pepin said. Sometimes patients also continue to take medication for a condition that is now gone, which can easily happen if they’re going between pharmacists and doctors as those lists “don’t always get transcribed correctly or shared between entities.”

This is why medication education for patients is so important to pharmacists like Pepin. Scheduling a time to consult with a pharmacist for a medicine checkup, or finding a primary physician with a built-in pharmacy team, can save you your health and money in the long run.