Care Transitions Pose High Risk for Medication Errors

When patients are hospitalized, providers sometimes modify or stop longstanding medications to focus on acute care. But, how often are these medications restarted after discharge? To examine risk for medication errors of omission that are attributable to hospitalization (with or without an intensive care unit [ICU] stay), researchers retrospectively evaluated Canadian administrative databases that contained information about 190,000 hospitalized and 210,000 nonhospitalized older patients (age, >65) who had been receiving one of five categories of medications for more than 1 year. Investigators attempted to exclude patients for whom medications had been stopped intentionally.

Previously prescribed medications were not refilled for significant…