Introduction: To understand the current status of and problems with drug administration support (DAS) for elderly people living in communities, we reviewed the original DAS articles for all healthcare professions.

Methods: We extracted and reviewed original articles published for 15 years from January 2000 in CiNii articles and "Igaku Chuo Zasshi". Key words were as follows: "elderly," "housebound," and "compliance management OR compliance guidance", based on the thesaurus in each database. The extracted articles were reviewed for content.

Result: In all, 34 articles were extracted. The individuals involved in DAS were family members, neighbors, home helpers, nurses, physicians, pharmacists, and devices for compliance support. Care managers were not included as support. The current status of DAS extracted by content analysis was "compliance assistance", "compliance management", and "coordination arrangement". Problems with DAS were "information sharing and inter-professional collaboration", "appropriate prescription plans for abilities and lifestyles of the elderly", and "establishing support for taking medicine".

Conclusion: We found that sharing information and inter-professional collaboration are needed to support drug administration for community-living elderly people in Japan.