(continued)

Medication-related problems can be prevented and avoided through better knowledge about appropriate medication use in the older population; through increased provider, patient, and care-giver education; through improvements in systems tracking medication use and outcomes in older people; and through new strategies to identify those older persons most at risk for medication-related problems, according to the Alliance for Aging Research special report.

The report's recommendations are intended to encourage steps that will reduce health care costs, needless hospitalizations, additional disabilities, and lives lost due to medication-related problems in older people. They are as follows:

1. Compile and disseminate a list of medications considered potentially inappropriate for use in older persons and mandate that the list be used as a screening tool.
   
2. Provide geriatrics-relevant labeling information for over-the-counter medications.
   
3. Fund and encourage research on medication-related problems in older persons to determine which medications are most troublesome and which patients are most at risk.
   
4. Provide incentives to pharmaceutical manufacturers to better study medication effects in the frail, elderly and the oldest-old in pre- and post- marketing clinical trials.
   
5. Establish mechanisms for data collection, monitoring, and analysis of medication-related problems by age group.
   
6. Encourage health care professionals' competency in geriatric pharmacotherapy.
   
7. Direct Medicare Graduate Medical Education dollars to training in geriatric pharmacotherapy.
   
8. Fund and provide education and resources for care-givers providing medication assistance to older people.