Hospitals Step Up Efforts To Avoid Medication Errors | WSJ | 1.12.05
It’s a simple enough concept: Hospitals should find out what medications a patient is taking when he or she is admitted. …
Studies show that nearly half of medication errors happen because of mistakes made during admission or discharge. By the end of this year, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, the leading accreditation group for hospitals, will require all hospitals to adopt procedures that include collecting a complete medication list, verifying it, and ensuring it is passed on to the next provider, whether inside or outside the hospital.
So hospitals are turning to “medication reconciliation,” a system of formal procedures to identify the most accurate list of a patient’s medications, and compare them at every step of the way with drug orders a doctor makes during admission, surgery, transfer or discharge.
MEDICATION CHECKLIST
Here’s how patients can help the ‘medication reconciliation’ process:
- List all prescription medications, including dosage, with name of prescribing physician and reason for taking drug
- List any drugs you have a known allergy to and describe reaction
- List immunization history
- List all over-the-counter medications and herbal supplements or vitamins
- Take the form to all doctor visits and medical testing labs, as well as pre-assessment visit for admission or surgery and all hospital visits including ER
- When you leave the hospital, be sure to get an updated form with new medications and ask if any medications are duplicated
- Keep a wallet-sized copy of the medications form with you at all times
The JCAHO deadline is all well and good, but without a pervasive healthcare IT infrastructure reconciling medication just can’t happen. What medications the patient take in the ER is a constant major problem! What they tell you they take and what is actually in the home is vastly different. I’ve gone to asking patient families/friends to go get all the medicines so that I can go over them—a very educational experience…