Addressing the Challenges of the Discharge Medication Reconciliation Process

Target Audience:  Pharmacists, Nurse Leaders, Quality Leaders

The collection of a complete, verified medication history is essential to the process of medication reconciliation and the prevention of unintentional medication discrepancies, both upon admission and discharge.

While medication reconciliation upon admission is a challenging process of identifying the medications a patient is taking at home and comparing them with newly ordered medications in the hospital, the medication reconciliation upon discharge is fraught with its own issues.  The challenges of this process include unintended omissions of home medications that were temporarily stopped during a hospital stay, duplicating medication orders either because the patient may already be taking the drug or due to confusion between name brand and generic versions of a drug or formulary substitutions; as well as prescribing incorrect dosages.  When a patient is discharged, it is important that the patient continue the same medication he/she was taking before, so as not to unintentionally disrupt the therapy.

This webinar will examine the critical steps in medication reconciliation, with a focus on the discharge process.  ISMP will identify challenges faced by ICAHN hospitals and talk about strategies to improve the reliability of the discharge medication process.