Introduction: Seniors and the Drug Information Age

Health reform of the 1990s has been largely cost-driven, with attention focused on cost efficiency and some, albeit less, emphasis on intervention effectiveness. Together with a health care crisis, the decade has simultaneously been characterized by an information crisis, yet little research has focused on the relevance of the knowledge explosion in health care. What is commonly called the health care &dquo;crisis&dquo; (defined as a turning point in The Concise Oxford Dictionary) is an international problem resulting from the increase in supply of and demand for health care services beyond the capacity of third-party payers’ budgets (Evans, Barer, & Hertzman,1991 ). At the same time, the information revolution is increasing the supply of and demand for information beyond the capacity of people to handle it. The two, the health care and information crises, merge in the area of prescription drugs. Seniors, clinicians, and third-party payers are deluged with conflicting information from multiple sources. The articles in this special section deal with the information age in the area of prescription medication use and seniors. They variously explore the information overload for policy makers (in this in-