(SU10) Breaking the Cycle of Psychiatric Medication Whack-A-Mole: A Framework for Successful Deprescribing

Sunday, March 10, 2024

1:00 PM – 2:30 PM CT

Room: 302

CME: (1.5) MOC: (1.5) CMD Clinical: (1.5) NP Pharmacology Hours (.5)

Session Chair/Speaker(s)

JT

Jay Tillman, M.D.

Behavioral Health Medical Director
Optum
Canton, Connecticut

Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose.

Speaker(s)

Carrie Brown, RN, BSN

Associate Director of Clinical Initiatives
Optum
Cheyenne, Wyoming

Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose.

Disclosure(s):

Angela Rudd, PharmD, BCPP: No financial relationships to disclose.

Carrie Brown, RN, BSN: No financial relationships to disclose.

Jay Tillman, MD: No financial relationships to disclose.

This session for healthcare providers, addresses the prevalent issue of psychiatric medication polypharmacy in long-term care. Due to limited behavioral health resources, healthcare professionals often rely on medication interventions despite associated side-effects. Reducing polypharmacy is challenging without specific compensatory strategies. Tapering most medications is feasible, and many can be stopped abruptly. The challenge lies in sustainably reducing high-risk medications without merely switching to equally risky alternatives. We'll introduce the Optum Behavioral Health Wheel, a tool for thoroughly and accurately characterizing psychiatric symptoms and their etiologies. The knowledge gained will serve to improve clinical decision-making for individualized behavioral healthcare, reduce entrenched polypharmacy, and break the cycle of escalating polypharmacy and ineffective class switching.

Learning Objectives:

At the completion of this session, learners will be able to:

Recognize the consequences and potential adverse outcomes of high-risk psychiatric medication polypharmacy in the long-term care setting.
Explain how the common result of solely focusing on the reduction and discontinuation of psychiatric medications frequently leads to substituting one type of high-risk medication with another.
Utilize the Optum Behavioral Health Wheel to thoroughly characterize psychiatric symptoms and investigate the primary factors contributing to their occurrence.
Apply the insights gained from the Optum Behavioral Health Wheel approach to decrease the use of high-risk psychiatric medication polypharmacy while concurrently enhancing behavioral health outcomes through the use of case studies.