Use of a codified medication process for documentation of home medications

To determine the quality and completeness of the list of home medications documented by nurses using a codified process, authors conducted a comparative study of home medications using a non-codified and codified process for documentation of required data fields including drug, dose, route of administration, frequency, and schedule. Each documented home medication (DHM) was evaluated based on the ability to convert to an inpatient medication order. The home medication was classified as non-convertible if one or more of the required data fields were missing, inaccurate, or incomplete. The study compared 176 patients with 1618 DHM in the non-codified group to 94 patients with 646 DHM in the codified group. All DHM could be converted to inpatient orders for 70% of the patients in the codified group compared with 42% in the non-codified group. Based on each DHM, the codified process resulted in 92% of the DHM being able to convert to inpatient orders compared with 82% for the non-codified process. Authors conclude that use of a codified process to document home medications has the potential to increase the number of complete drug entries and in the number of patients with a DHM list in which all of the medication entries have all of the dosing information.