Background: Determining the quality of medication reconciliation (MR) is a laborious and time-intensive process, often involving chart review and detailed patient interviews. Purpose: To identify meaningful, measurable process measures for high-quality MR obtainable from electronic health records (EHR), and to determine if performance on these measures responded to a campaign focused on improving MR. Description: [...]

Background: Up to 67% of patients have at least one medication error on admission to the hospital with over a quarter of hospital prescribing errors attributed to incomplete medication histories at admission. Key aspects of successful interventions to date include intensive pharmacy staff involvement. However, pharmacists are in short supply in many hospitals. Methods: A [...]

Background: U.S. healthcare costs are rising due to the increase in polypharmacy, which is a potential risk factor for hospital readmission.1 In a cohort study of 5,507 patients with ≥10 discharge medications, more than 25% of them were readmitted.1 At one of the largest public county hospitals in the U.S., readmission rates for patients with high-volume home [...]

Case Presentation: A 58- year-old female presented with vomiting, dizziness, and a blood pressure of 80/60 mmHg. Laboratory: serum creatinine 3.1 mg/dl (baseline 1 mg/dl), BUN 34 mg/dl (baseline 10 mg/dl), corrected calcium 12.3 mg/dl, low PTH , normal 25-OH vitamin D, and normal PTH-related protein. Two months prior, serum calcium was normal and 25-OH [...]