It's a doggone shame to single out man's best friend when we need to address medication management. A recent posting on the WSJ HealthBlog titled "CDC to Americans: Don't Trip Over Your Dog" noted that 1 percent of emergency room visits for falls are pet-related. That's "ruff"-ly 86,000 Americans injured with dogs as the major culprit.
While those 86,000 falls are important, even more important is the need to 
look at the major causes of the majority of falls affecting one of every three older Americans--about 12 million seniors--such as medications. Dr. Judy Stevens, PhD, an epidemiologist at CDC's Injury Center, says that "medication reviews are an important method of reducing an older person's risk of falling. Because of their higher rates of chronic health problems, older adults often take multiple medications whose potential side effects--such as drowsiness and dizziness--can lead to a fall, particularly when the drugs are combined." With health care costs for falls totaling $20 billion per year, we need to resolve this major contributing factor.
I recently visited with June Simmons, MSW, at the Partners in Care Foundation (PICF), a leader in the use of health information technology that helps identify medication issues and prevent problems such as falls. Her efforts, both in California and nationally, confirm that 60 percent of older adults are on medications that may cause them harm. Partners in Care Foundation is using Hartford Foundation support to demonstrate a technology-assisted medication management program for frail older adults who, despite being eligible for placement in a nursing home, live in their own homes. Targeting high-risk problems such as drug duplication or incompatibilities, the project has home health care personnel enter a client's medications into a computer, along with recent physical symptoms (such as low blood pressure, reports of dizziness, confusion, or falls), to determine if a pharmacist or doctor should review the patient's prescriptions. The intervention takes advantage of a key opportunity--social workers and nurses already collect most of the medication data needed to identify potential errors but previously did not have any means to analyze the clinical information.
So where falls are concerned, pat your pets and check those pill bottles.
For more information on the Partners in Care Foundation, see:
www.picf.org