Ah yes, Thanksgiving is over and every one's back at work, including me. Unfortunately, I'm stuck in the Atlanta airport (apparently there's fog somewhere so just to be safe, the entire airport is at a standstill). Just gives me time to update the blog.

This week there's a new account going live with an automated medication reconciliation solution (designed by the company I work for). This group should be of particular interest because they are incredibly pharmacy centric. Based on my observations, hospitals that utilize pharmacists heavily for the medication reconciliation process tend to have higher success rates and much better error prevention. This is not to say nurses are doing a bad job, it's simply that pharmacists, for obvious reasons, understand medications and medication habits better than other specialties. So this group plans on utilizing our system for automated medication history retrieval which will be directed to a printer. Then, pharmacy technicians will perform the initial review and assessment followed by an overview from the pharmacist. All appropriate interventions will take place immediately and then the form is passed on to the next caregiver. At time of discharge, the original assessment document will be compared to the inpatient profile. The physician will then make recommendations for discharge medications and a discharge profile is created and discussed with the patient. Sounds simple huh......