Prescribing Patterns in Nursing Home Residents Living with Dementia by Specialty and Provider Type

Introduction/Background
By 2060, nearly 14 million people are expected to be living with dementia.1 Treating the complex clinical and behavioral issues of people living with dementia (PLWD) is difficult because behavioral symptoms often occur in combination with pain symptoms2–4 and in a context of increasing cognitive impairment and communication challenges as dementia severity progresses. Little is known about the contributions of different clinical specialties in prescribing medications for this population nor about prescribing patterns by clinical specialty and provider type. In this report, we examine prescribing patterns for common psychiatric medications and for opioid and non-opioid analgesics in long-term nursing home residents with dementia by clinician specialty and provider type.