Why medication reconciliation

Page Content. This requires specific steps as well as clear roles and responsibilities. But the first challenge — and it can be a significant one — is getting the initial list of medications right. Consider the following scenario: You are an emergency department nurse. An elderly patient has arrived by ambulance, pale and short of breath. The five prescriptions she was discharged with and the bottles in front of you are only a partial match. When the information is incomplete or inaccurate, there can be discontinuities in care.

Without well-designed steps to share medication information and treatment decisions at transition points — when patients are admitted to the hospital, transferred from one unit to another, or discharged —quality and safety are both compromised.

In fact, studies show that inconsistent knowledge and record keeping about medications directly threaten patient safety, causing up to 50 percent of all medication errors in the hospital and up to 20 percent of adverse drug events ADEs. Medication reconciliation has been shown to reduce adverse drug events ADEs. Medication reconciliation is designed to avoid the most common medication errors: inadvertently omitting a medication a patient was taking at home during a hospital stay; failing to ensure that home medications temporarily stopped during a hospital stay are restarted when the patient is transferred or discharged; duplicating medication orders either because the patient may already be taking the drug or due to confusion between brand and generic versions of a drug or formulary substitutions; as well as prescribing incorrect dosages.

These steps are more difficult than they might appear. The challenge is exacerbated by the fragmented nature of the US health care system. Federico also co-chaired a statewide patient safety initiative to reduce medication errors sponsored by the Massachusetts Coalition for the Prevention of Medical Errors. The hospital medical record may be incomplete, considering that most care is administered in the ambulatory setting.

Moreover, for patients who are admitted to the hospital through the ED, incomplete information can perpetuate mistakes. Provide Feedback Submit a Case. Use quotes to search for an exact match of a phrase. Example: "communication between providers and nurses". Put a minus sign just before words you don't want.

Example: "adverse events" -"drug". Example: medication safety. The PSNet Collection. Patient Safety Training and Education. Improvement Resources. About PSNet. The Fundamentals Primers Topics Glossary. All Content. Current Weekly Issue. Past Weekly Issues. Curated Libraries. The Fundamentals. Continuing Education.

Training Catalog. Editorial Team. Technical Expert Panel. Copy URL. Step-by-step instructions for reviewing closed patient records to identify errors related to unreconciled medications.

A tool for tracking data during a test of medication reconciliation during admission. Loading Pages Use the materials in the toolkit as guidance for developing a medication reconciliation process in your hospital or outpatient practice setting. This resource for patients and families provides an overview of how to prevent adverse drug events by reconciling medications at all transitions in care at admission, transfer, and discharge.

Patients: TDD: Nov 26, Meritus Health Articles. Bring your bottles and make a list. There is less chance that a medication or prescription is forgotten or overlooked. Your provider can more effectively work with you to consolidate and avoid unnecessary duplications of medications or prescriptions that treat the same symptoms.