Medication Reconciliation

Patients admitted to a hospital commonly receive new medicines or have alterations to their existing medication regimen. Clinicians may not be able to access patients’ complete medication records and be unaware of recent changes to the patient’s medicines. Thus, the new medicines prescribed at the time of discharge may drop out needed medications, unnecessarily duplicate existing medicine list, or contain inappropriate dosages.

Such inconsistencies in medication regimens may occur at any point of transition in care, as well as at hospital admission or discharge. Medication reconciliation can be defined as the process of avoiding inconsistencies across transitions in care by reviewing the patient’s complete medication course at the time of admission, transfer, and discharge and comparing it with the prescription being considered for the new setting of care.

The Institute of Healthcare Improvement (IHI) defines medication reconciliation as a process of identifying the most accurate list of all medications a patient is taking-including name, dosage, frequency, and route and using the list to provide correct medications for patients anywhere within the health care system. For patients admitted to a hospital, this process involves comparing the patient’s current list of medications against the physician’s admission, transfer, and/or discharge order.

What’s New

2012 Webinar series on Medication Reconciliation

Please mark your calendars for a four-part series on innovative approaches to medicine reconciliation. All webinars will be on Wednesdays from Noon to 1:00pm, and will be relevant for everyone working on this challenging process. Speakers and specific topics will be announced as available:

• February 1:
Meg Kilcup, PharmD, Group Health Cooperative, on “Medication Reconciliation: Effects Across the Continuum – Group Health’s journey of inter-disciplinary approaches to medication reconciliation in striving to increase patient safety while decreasing cost, adverse drug events and readmissions.”
• May 2
• September 5
• November 7

Like our monthly Patient Safety Webinars series, these will be available at no charge for Coalition members. There will be a charge of $40 per line for non-members.  Please RSVP to Miriam Marcus-Smith.