A pharmacist-led initiative focused on medication list discrepancies significantly reduced hospitalizations among home health patients in Washington State.
Leaders at Washington State University’s College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences in Spokane spearheaded the quality improvement effort and recently published their findings in Home Health Care Now.
An interdisciplinary team of pharmacy faculty developed a reconciliation tool accounting for 13 different types of medication list discrepancies, along with training for nurses and other clinicians at Providence VNA Home Health, now Providence at Home With Compassus.
Clinicians were trained to “think like a pharmacist” — evaluating medication lists not only for consistency across providers but also for appropriateness, effectiveness, safety and adherence. The project aimed to extend pharmacy-based thinking into home care settings, which typically lack clinical pharmacist involvement, according to an Oct. 15 news release.
The effort cut hospitalizations among high-risk heart failure patients from 23.4% to 11.4% during a 10-week implementation period. Over a 17-month span, the project also reduced all-cause rehospitalizations from 13.5% to 11.9%.
“Best practices suggest medication reconciliation cannot stop with matching up the medication list with what the patient is taking and updating the electronic record. We trained the clinicians to think like a pharmacist by streamlining the reconciliation process and providing medication evaluation,” study author Jeffrey Clark, PharmD, an associate professor in the College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, said in the news release.
