A prospective assessment of the Medicaid Web portal for admission medication reconciliation at a community hospital in Montana.
Publication Title
American journal of health-system pharmacy : AJHP : official journal of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-21-2021
Keywords
montana; missoula; sph
Abstract
DISCLAIMER: In an effort to expedite the publication of articles related to the COVID-19 pandemic, AJHP is posting these manuscripts online as soon as possible after acceptance. Accepted manuscripts have been peer-reviewed and copyedited, but are posted online before technical formatting and author proofing. These manuscripts are not the final version of record and will be replaced with the final article (formatted per AJHP style and proofed by the authors) at a later time.
PURPOSE: Medication reconciliation (MR) is a complicated and tedious process but is crucial to prevent errors when ordering patients' discharge medications during a hospital admission. Our institution currently uses a variety of methods to gather a patient's medication history, including review of the medical records and electronic pharmaceutical claims data (EPCD) from a commercial health information exchange organization, as well as a patient or caregiver interview. Occasionally, more information is needed to obtain the most accurate history. To augment current methods, EPCD can also be accessed for patients with Medicaid insurance using a state Medicaid Web portal. We aimed to evaluate the utility of the Medicaid Web portal for reducing medication errors during the MR process at hospital admission.
SUMMARY: A single-center, prospective, quality improvement initiative was conducted to evaluate 100 patient medication lists for all nonobstetric Medicaid patients admitted to our institution to identify discrepancies in medication lists when the state Medicaid Web portal was used in addition to standard MR methods. We found that, when EPCD from commercial organizations were available, they matched the patient's current medication list 64% of the time. One in 4 patients had at least 1 discrepancy on their verified medication list that was identified using the Medicaid Web portal. The discrepancies identified were addressed and corrected in real time to improve patient care.
CONCLUSION: EPCD from the state Medicaid Web portal could supplement the use of current methods to obtain a more accurate medication history and reduce the number of erroneously ordered discharge medications during hospital admission.
Specialty/Research Institute
Pharmacy
Specialty/Research Institute
Health Information Technology
