Loading...
In 2005, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations mandated medication reconciliation as a national patient safety goal. Establishing an accurate list of a patient’s current medications intuitively seems like a prerequisite for high-quality care, but few rigorous studies have been designed to assess whether medication reconciliation improves patient outcomes.
During 2 months in 2006, researchers randomized 322 patients at two large academic hospitals in Boston to a Web-based intervention that created preadmission medication lists from ambulatory electronic medical record systems and discharge orders or to standard independent collection of medication histories. Process redesign for the intervention included physicians…