Impact of electronic medication reconciliation at hospital admission on clinician workflow

Many hospitals have experienced challenges with accomplishing the Joint Commission's National Patient Safety Goal for medication reconciliation. Our institution implemented a fully electronic process for performing and documenting medication reconciliation at hospital admission. The process used a commercial EHR and relied on a longitudinal medication list called the "Outpatient Medication Profile" (OMP). Clinician compliance with documenting medication reconciliation was difficult to achieve, but approached 100% after a "hard-stop" reminder was implemented. We evaluated the impact of the process at a large urban academic medical center. Before the new process was adopted, the average number of medications contained in the OMP for a patient upon admission was <2. One year after adoption, the average number had increased to 4.7, and there were regular updates made to the list. Updating the OMP was predominantly done by physicians, NPs, and PAs (94%), followed by nurses (5%) and pharmacists (1%).