Once a senior is in the hospital, Kearney said, physicians there sometimes change the patient's prescription plan - making medication management even more befuddling.
"Patients are in and out of the hospital setting, and every time they're in, their medications are revised, things are dropped, things are added. Prescriptions are substituted even in the outpatient setting," Kearney said. "So patients are pretty constantly having their drug lists altered. Even if they are equivalent drugs [that are being substituted], it's still very confusing."
As one solution, many doctors have begun asking patients to bring all their prescriptions and over-the-counter drugs, vitamins and herbal supplements to every office visit - a method they call "brown-bagging."
But this method puts too much responsibility on the patient, some experts say.
"It seems rather primitive in the 21st century that you have to have patients bring in their pill bottles in a brown paper bag," said Lowe. "I think the onus has to be on the physicians who are prescribing the medications to make sure that the medications they are prescribing will not and do not interact with what the patient is already taking."
To that end, Lowe said, there has been a push for doctors to move to electronic medical records, which follow a patient from specialist to specialist.
"The government is pushing us very hard, and rightly so, to go to the electronic medical record," said Lowe, whose offices moved to such a practice two years ago and who says he has seen "immense" improvements.
"It has the great potential to reduce this prescribing in a vacuum."
Health concerns are the most obvious ramification of mismanaging medications. But incorrectly taking prescription drugs also can lead to a senior's loss of independence.
"About 23 percent of nursing home admissions is due to mismanagement of medications," said Joan Chang, medical director at Good Samaritan Nursing Center. "What we're seeing is that because people don't have that social support, they don't have the means or ways of getting their medication taken appropriately, so they have to go to some kind of assisted living, where someone is there to help."
Without assistance from a Towson-based elder care group called Senior Helpers, Ida Canapp would most likely be forced to give up her home, where she has lived for more than 50 years, and be admitted to an assisted-living center or nursing home, Gowland, her niece, said.
