Comparison of the Completeness of Prescription Medication Histories
INTRODUCTION
To prescribe safely, physicians must know which medications their patients are using. However, medication histories documented in hospital medical records are often inaccurate, and these inaccuracies may be the source of drug-related problems. Since most adverse drug events are avoidable, their prevention has become a high priority for health care professionals.
Because advancing age increases the risk of chronic illness, geriatric patients are more likely to require drug treatment and often require more medications than younger patients. The greater use of medications is a risk factor for inaccurate documentation of medication history, which is reflected in the frequency with which errors are found in elderly patients’ hospital records. Further, it is well documented that seniors are at higher risk for adverse drug events. Up to 19% of hospital admissions of older people in Canada are the result of drug-related adverse patient events. As many as 15% of hospitalized elderly patients experience preventable adverse drug events.
Recently, licensed pharmacists were given access to PharmaNet in British Columbia hospitals. PharmaNet is a provincial computer database that records medication information for all prescription transactions processed by community pharmacies in British Columbia, regardless of patient age, payment method, or insurance coverage. Previous research using this database has suggested that underreporting and misclassifications within the database are minimal. Prescriptions filled for institutionalized patients are not recorded in PharmaNet, and hospital pharmacists are not required to review PharmaNet for dispensing or for clinical purposes. Pharmacists’ use of this database is anticipated to facilitate accurate medication history-taking for plus grand nombre de problemes relies a la pharmacotherapie, bien qu’on ne puisse dire clairement si cela etait attribuable a son utilisation. Malgre que les bases de donnees sur les ordonnances constituent une source pratique d’information sur l’histoire medicamenteuse, les pharmaciens pourraient devoir s’adresser aux patients directement afin d’obtenir des renseignements complets. Une etude prospective et randomisee, faisant appel a une evaluation definitive des medicaments pris avant l’admission des patients a titre de groupe temoin, est necessaire avant de pouvoir tirer des conclusions certaines. levitra 20 mg
Hospitalized patients, which could be used to identify, prevent, and resolve drug-related problems. However, hospital pharmacists have found the use of PharmaNet time-consuming because access to it is restricted to a small number of terminals in secured areas and information cannot be sorted or searched.
The goal of this study was to evaluate the completeness of the information about geriatric patients’ medication histories documented by various health care professionals and to assess the utility of PharmaNet for identifying medications taken before admission, as well as drug problems related to these medications.
