Research Paper: The Importance of Medication Reconciliation

📌Category: Health, Medicine
📌Words: 1079
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 07 June 2022

“According to the Institute of Medicine’s Preventing Medication Errors report, the average hospitalized patient is subject to at least one medication error per day” (Barnsteiner,2008). This may be a small number, but the effects that happen during errors can cause great chaos. What do you think it means to reconcile? CNA’s, MA’s, nurses and practitioners all play an essential role in obtaining the patients medication and accurate history. I think that medication reconciliation is a major part of taking in detail about the patient. Everything must be accurate checked and processed before letting a patient be discharge and even during discharge, it shall be taken seriously and with information the patient has a right to.

Medication reconciliation is the process of when you compare a patient’s medication order to all of the medications the patient has been taking. According to an article called, “Medication reconciliation”, it states that, “more than 40 percent of medication errors are believed to result from inadequate reconciliation in handoffs during admission, transfer, and discharge of patients” (Barnsteiner, 2008). Reconciliation occurs due to omissions, duplications, dosing errors as well as drug interactions. Omissions is when an appropriate medication is not ordered to a patient for two reasons. Those reasons include not being prescribed at all or it just have not been administered yet. Duplication is another way of saying that the person who gave a certain medication too many times. Dosing errors is when you give the wrong amount of medicine to a patient and drug interactions is when the medication interacts with something the patient might have took, ate or drank. Medication reconciliation can occur in hospitals, doctors’ offices, ambulatory care, and any nursing facilities that cares for elderly. Performing this task is important for every discharge. This is because we are ensuring that every patient understand any new medication that may have been prescribed as well as any discontinued or changed medicine. This also ensure that they have an open discussion on questions and answers and pamphlets to better inform them about the medicine. 1 common right each and every patient have is the right to know about anything that goes on within their body and care. It is important for all physicians, nurses, and assistants to keep record of everything and to be organized to reduce error in the workplace. You may wonder how this is kept up to date with a lot of patients and visits within multiple healthcare settings. One-way medication reconciliation is kept up to date is by interviewing the patient even if you know the patient or if the patient has had plenty of prior visits. Everything written down by the MA should be updated within the system. This includes any medication that’s new or discontinued, any new health issues or drug and alcohol use. Keeping each and every patient’s history up to date promotes better diagnoses if need be. Another way it is kept up to date by initially everything done to each patient in regard to medicine, charts and documentation done. This ensures that everyone has done their job and if any error is made, a physician can correct it immediately. Medication reconciliation benefits all healthcare settings by either reducing costs, unnecessary hospitalization, and other vital resources. Based on the article, “ medication reconciliation”, it states that,”… the accuracy of medication lists went from 45 percent to 95 percent with the implementation of reconciliation standards” (Barnsteiner, 2008). Going back to when I previously stated that it is important for all physicians, nurses and assistants to keep everything organized. This also benefits that fact that each and every one is working as a team to evaluate and conquer each and every patient chart. This should eliminate anything duplicated from patient interviews. All facilities should also include protocols, policies and procedure when it comes to certain tasks needed for completion. Having those policies ensures everyone is taught the same thing an gets it done the same way. Medication reconciliation can be conducted by a practitioner, clinical pharmacists or a registered nurse. If a medical assistant, certified nursing assistant or licensed practical nurse completes medical reconciliation discharge paperwork and practitioner, nurse or pharmacist must sign off on all documentation. Certain downfalls like time, resources as well as false information could result in medication reconciliation not achieving up to its highest potential in healthcare settings. I say this because an article states that, “Time and motion analysis shows that as many as 46 minutes are needed to obtain admission medication histories from medical patients…”(Pevnick, Shane, Schnipper 2016). Although technology has been innovated and more documents are filed through an EHR system, there may be times in which too many patients and the atmosphere becomes hectic. There can be times where internet or servers are down and there is no way to get to a patient’s chart without paper being documented. It takes several minutes to get through papers especially with thousands of people who visit a facility every day. Resources could be low. There may be lack of workers with a full facility trying to provide the most care to each and every person. In some cases when people are discharged, details can be left out, follow ups may not be scheduled right. For example, when the pandemic first created a widespread there were many people in and out of hospitals urgent cares and more. There were lack of beds and nurses’ assistants and doctors all trying to provide care with respect of time to each patient in and out. A lot of things can accidently be missed when dealing with such a chaos. False information is also a big downfall when patients give out the wrong information as well as previous reports in the record not being clear enough. This creates adverse effects, contraindications, misuse and or omissions.

Being aware that medicating reconciliation is a huge part of the health facility makes the day go by easier in my opinion. If discharge is done carefully and provided with much information, the facilities reduce the number of times a patient might need to come to an in-care facility. Having a successful patient interview also makes discharge go by fast. Interviewing provides history medication change, illness, and more when properly taken.  Taking a close look into what the patient is taking versus what the patient is being prescribed will avoid any precautions and promote safety for the patient. Although there are many discrepancies when it comes to medication reconciliation, educating the patient is a vital source. The practitioner should always make sure his/her team has each and every outlet of sources to look into to further educate themselves as well as the patient. Handouts and examples should be given as appropriate to the situation. Make the patient feel ok to call the office or hospital for question; let it be known that some sites are reliable to look into as well. For example, an app called, “MyMedRec”, is an app that the patient can use to log in every medication and keep a list of updated health records.

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