The American Medical Association adopted a policy to ensure deprescribing is considered part of routine patient-centered care.
“It is important that we recognize deprescribing as an essential, routine component of medication optimization and high-quality clinical care,” AMA Board Member Ilse Levin, DO, said in a Nov. 9 news release shared with Becker’s. “Deprescribing is not simply about taking patients off medications, but about ensuring medications continue to provide more benefit than harm over time.”
Here is what to know.
1. The policy defines deprescribing as “the planned, supervised process of reducing or discontinuing medications when continued use may no longer provide clinical benefit, may cause harm that outweighs benefit, or is misaligned with a patient’s goals of care, particularly among older adults and during transitions of care.”
2. An AMA Council on Science and Public Health report, which served as the basis for the policy, found barriers to deprescribing included unclear professional roles, care fragmentation and a lack of clinical workflows and interoperability across healthcare organizations.
3. As rates of polypharmacy rise, deprescribing may help safely reduce medication burden and improve some clinical and economic outcomes, the report found. The policy encourages broader research of deprescribing on clinical outcomes and best practices, as well as education for physicians, care teams and patients.
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