Polypharmacy & Drug
Interaction Management

• Perform structured medication reconciliation at every transition of care
• Identify high-risk medication classes using the Beers Criteria and STOPP/START framing
• Recognize the prescribing cascade — a drug side effect mistaken for a new disease and treated with another drug
• Quantify cumulative anticholinergic burden and link it to cognitive and falls risk using the ACB tool
• Apply a stepwise deprescribing framework: review indication, weigh risk vs benefit, prioritize, and taper
• Design safe taper plans and distinguish withdrawal effects from disease recurrence
• Communicate medication concerns to prescribers using SBAR

This module was developed from medication-use review across North American primary care, hospital, and long-term care settings — not from textbook pharmacology alone. WestNet HealthOS surfaces every active medication a person is taking across every prescriber, because the most dangerous drug interaction is often the one no single clinician can see from inside one chart.

Module 06 is not anti-medication. Medicines, used well, are among the great achievements of clinical care. It is anti-thoughtless accumulation — the slow, well-intentioned drift in which each new symptom earns a new prescription, no one ever revisits the old ones, and a person ends up on twelve drugs that quietly work against one another.

Polypharmacy — commonly defined as the routine use of five or more medications — is not in itself a diagnosis. The problem is inappropriate polypharmacy: drugs that no longer have an indication, that duplicate one another, that treat the side effect of another drug, or whose risk has quietly outgrown their benefit as the person aged and their physiology changed.