Medication Management

what is Medication Management?

Many chronic mental health issues are comorbid with other physical and mental conditions, such as depression with anxiety and substance use issues, chronic pain with depression. Comprehensive, holistic treatment plans for chronic mental and physical health issues often include medications. However, medication adherence is a serious problem – especially among people with chronic conditions. Without adequate support, it can be difficult to stick to a holistic treatment plan, one which combines different modalities and medications, creating complex and sometimes overbearing schedules.

Medication management) is a service provided by psychiatrists and other healthcare professionals aimed to consolidate and simplify a client’s pharmacological treatment through close professional cooperation and client consultation.

Male mental health professional explains an anti depressant medication to a female patient. The patient is holding the medication container.

The idea behind medication management is to ensure that a client’s medications, supplements, over-the-counter drugs, herbal products, diet, and non-pharmacological treatments are carefully reviewed to identify and eliminate potential problems or overseen contraindications, provide better in-depth medication-related psychoeducation and consultation to answer any unanswered questions, and continue to collaborate with the clinical team and family members to create a medication support network that ensures treatment adherence through interventions, follow-up appointments and calls, and regular check-ins.

Importance of Medication Management

Medication adherence is crucial for people with chronic health issues, including chronic mental health issues. Technological interventions can help, such as setting reminders on a person’s smartphone or smartwatch based on their medication schedule.

Medication management also helps reduce overlapping medications or identify potential contraindications between prescribed medications and herbal or dietary supplements, which can sometimes be overlooked when a person bounces from one medical professional to the next over the course of a large-scale treatment plan.

A comprehensive treatment plan for comorbid chronic conditions is interdisciplinary, meaning that healthcare specialists from different areas of expertise must come together to plan and devise a coherent, multimodal approach.

Interdisciplinary treatment approaches require collaboration between different healthcare professionals, ranging from pain specialists to therapists, nurses, and pharmacists. A treatment plan that incorporates medication management takes an extra step to ensure that every client’s medication plan is carefully reviewed to improve outcomes and safety.

Medication Management at Resolutions

We incorporate medication management at Resolutions for all clients with chronic or complex mental and physical health conditions, specifically when clients have multiple prescriptions from different physicians.

Through medication management, we provide an additional form of security to clients worried about the complexity of a multimodal, interdisciplinary treatment plan. In addition to prescribed medications, we also take a closer look at each client’s diet and additional supplements, as well as their physical and mental health histories.

Once a medication management plan is in place, it’s important for us to continue to schedule follow-up calls to review if a client’s medications have changed, and to offer further support in order to improve or maintain treatment adherence.

Convenience is important, but sometimes treatments are simply inconvenient – and that’s when support matters most. Through our psychoeducation programs, we also aim to help mobilize family members to improve their loved one’s medication adherence.