Medication reconciliation

The goal of medication reconciliation is to provide correct medications to the patient at all transition points within the hospital and at discharge. At every transition point, a nurse must review previous medication orders with new orders to reconcile differences to help eliminate medication errors. Poor communication of a patient’s medical information at transition points results in medication errors and adverse drug events.

JCAHO Requirements

According to the JCAHO National patient safety goals, accurately and completely reconciling medications across the continuum of care is an important patienty safety goal. It is important to recognize that sound system design is intrinsic to the delivery of safe, high quality health care, the goals generally focus on system-wide solutions, wherever possible.

Med Rec Form

Using a standardized medication reconciliation form, the nurse can completely reconcile medications and obtain other information that can improve patient safety. Consequently, the physician will have an organized document with current information at hand to reconcile. The nurse can them compare the list against the physician’s admission, transfer, and/or discharge orders. this form was created to obtain an accurate list of all medications (prescriptions, over-the-counter, supplements, herbals, etc.) taken by the patient at home prior to out-patient or in-patient admission. This includes the drug name, dosage, frequency and route.

Download!! – You can download this form from the clinical toolkit page.