Medication Reconciliation
Keeping an up-to-date
medication list for all patients is important to help reduce the amount
of medication error during hospital stays. Studies have found that as
many as 42% of admissions will have at least one omitted medication from
a patient's regular routine.
Any instance of a
patient transition opens up the opportunity for missed or incorrect
information. These are just a few examples:
Project Status
The
project team includes participants from hospital
pharmacies, hospital management, community pharmacies and long term
care.
Goals
The
team noted that each organization is currently working on an internal
process for reconciling medications at the time of admission and that a
good area to work together is at the time of discharge. The team
identified one short-term and one long-term goal.
-
Short-term: Standardize the medication component of the discharge
process across the community.
-
Long-term: Work on an information technology solution to keep an
electronic medication list for patients in the community.
Current Status
The
team has gathered information on current discharge processes for each of
the hospitals and has developed a standard hospital discharge form. This
form contains all of the data elements needed to successfully manage
patient's medications after discharge from the hospital.
Data on patient discharges was collected July 2005 from 15 local
outpatient pharmacies. The data showed that considerable improvement is
needed during this patient transition to home. MPSC hospitals are in the
process of interpreting the data and piloting new processes as well as
implementing the discharge form in order to provide correct, timely and
relevant information to community pharmacists.
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