Quality of Home Medication Collection in the Emergency Department: Reconciliation Discrepancies

Introduction

The objective of the study was to assess home medication data collected at the emergency department in a tertiary hospital. It also aimed to identify whether any possible deficiencies in this collection were translated as reconciliation errors on admission, to analyse and classify these data and identify the pharmacological groups involved.

Methods

A prospective observational study was carried out which analysed the pharmacotherapeutic data collected at the emergency department. Patients who were admitted to the Pneumology and Internal Medicine wards at the Miguel Servet University Hospital in Zaragoza were included. A list of the home drugs taken before the hospital stay was compiled, assessing whether the quality deficiencies in data collected in the emergency department translated as reconciliation errors at admission. Unjustified discrepancies were considered and classified in line with the criteria of the consensus document on terminology, classification and assessment of the drug reconciliation programmes for 2009.

Results

We included 136 patients, finding reconciliation errors in 86.8%. The total number of reconciliation errors found was 519. The most frequent types were: omitting a drug, missing dose information, missing administration frequency information. Almost 40% of the reconciliation errors found in the Internal Medicine ward were not resolved, which was double to that of the Pneumology ward. Most discrepancies were found for the Digestive System and Metabolism group (24%).

Conclusions

The percentage of patients that experienced reconciliation errors was high (86%), observing an important opportunity to improve at patient admission to the emergency department.