Drug-age alerting for outpatient geriatric prescriptions: a joint study using interoperable drug standards

For more than a decade, the Beers criteria have identified specific medications that should generally be avoided in the geriatric population. Studies that have shown high prevalence rates of these potentially inappropriate medications have used disparate methodologies to identify these medications and hence are difficult to replicate and generalize. In an effort to improve prescribing behavior, we are building a drug-age alerting system utilizing standard drug coding systems for use in our Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems.