MedPoint for Hospitals Provides Medication History Quickly and Effortlessly

Improving patient drug intelligence and meeting the Joint Commission’s recent safety goal for medication reconciliation without increasing administrative costs or upsetting current IT priorities is a tall order for most hospitals. A new web-based product from Ingenix – MedPoint for Hospitals – helps health care facilities achieve a proper balance between patient safety and administrative ease by providing a patient’s detailed prescription history in real time.

“MedPoint for Hospitals is the foundation for the medication reconciliation process because it procures this hard-to-get data, reduces administrative costs and is not disruptive to IT initiatives,” according to Steve Greenberg, Ingenix senior vice president, Provider Solutions Group. “This tool can be put in place today and used at your hospital tomorrow.”

Medication errors are often caused by incomplete drug histories

Although certain medication adverse events are not preventable, many are, Greenberg said, and reducing those errors can save lives. Dr. Janet Woodcock, the Food and Drug Administration’s director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, has testified that an estimated 7,000 people die annually from medication errors.

A medication error is defined by the National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention as “any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in the control of the health care professional, patient, or consumer.” Although several factors can lead to medication errors, the American Hospital Association reports that one common factor is incomplete patient information, such as not knowing patients' allergies, other medicines they are taking, previous diagnoses and lab results.

Gathering this information from patients, health care providers and pharmacists can be a time-consuming and less-than-precise endeavor, Greenberg stated. “When the process is manual, it is up to a hospital staff member to interview the patient, who may report that she takes a ‘red pill’ twice a day and a ‘green pill’ once a day,” he said. “At that point, staff must reach out to doctors or pharmacists to get a complete medication picture, which often comes too late.”

Joint Commission calls for medication reconciliation

Recognizing that hospitals are a linchpin in reducing the number of preventable medication errors, in 2005 the Joint Commission established Patient Safety Goal #8, which states that hospitals seeking accreditation must “accurately and completely reconcile medications across the continuum of care.” By January 2006, accredited organizations were expected to develop and test processes for medication reconciliation, which must be performed upon patient admission and discharge. To maintain accreditation, hospitals now are required to have a fully implemented medication reconciliation process.

“At a minimum, reconciliation must occur at any time the organization requires that orders be rewritten and any time the patient changes service, setting, provider or level of care and new medication orders are written,” the Joint Commission states. “For transitions not involving new medications or rewriting of orders, the organization should determine whether reconciliation must occur.”

The Institute of Healthcare Improvement estimates that poor communication of medical information at transition points within a facility is responsible for as many as 50 percent of all medication errors and up to 20 percent of all adverse events in hospitals.

Indeed, transition points – where patients are transferred from one department’s service to another (e.g., from the emergency department to the surgical unit) – are problematic when relying on print or paper solutions, because paper records do not always travel with the patient around the hospital, according to Greenberg.

Real-time solution provides drug history in seconds

When Ingenix began exploring solutions for medication reconciliation, the company went to hospitals to see if there was interest in a real-time solution that would help hospitals mitigate preventable adverse drug events. “It was extremely well received,” Greenberg said.

To bring hospitals a web-based product that would provide a highly detailed medication history for each patient, Ingenix explored an existing system that had been developed for another purpose: MedPoint. The MedPoint product – a robust repository of medication history data procured from all major prescription sources (up to 19 data suppliers) – is used by the life and health insurance industry to reduce underwriting costs and improve risk assessment.

“After doing research, we found that with some very minor tweaking, this product could be applicable in a hospital environment,” Greenberg said. “Now it has been architected as MedPoint for Hospitals to specifically help hospitals with their reconciliation management.”

Compared with manual reconciliation, which can take between 15 minutes and 45 minutes when done by hospitals that have very efficient processes, the MedPoint for Hospitals technology, launched June 24, provides a very detailed medication history for the patient in seconds, prior to any medication orders being written for that patient. A single MedPoint request initiates simultaneous requests to multiple data sources and produces a single report.

“The idea of being able to do a real-time request and get that information back in seconds is really helpful, not only for patient safety, but for the purposes of reducing the costs associated with trying to get that data,” Greenberg added.

MedPoint for Hospitals also helps solve the transition point problem, because it is easily accessible among various hospital department computers. The report generated by MedPoint includes a patient’s prescription history (up to five years), including all fill dates and specific drug details. MedPoint also utilizes a proprietary database containing physician information to match a provider’s DEA identification number to prescriptions and delivers both the prescribing physician’s demographic information as well as dispensing pharmacy information.

MedPoint solution is easy, seamless

Another key advantage of MedPoint for Hospitals is that it operates outside of a hospital’s IT department – so it does not affect other IT initiatives – and it is easy to use. “After patients consent to the MedPoint search, designated hospital staff only have to enter six fields, including name, date of birth, gender and Social Security number, to initiate the multi-source data request,” Greenberg said. Patients then are asked to validate the information. “Additionally, we have made sure the product can easily integrate with a hospital’s existing complex Clinical Information and Electronic Medical Records systems, which further avoids IT disruption,” he said.

Hospitals can run batch reports for scheduled admissions and transitions, which can save even more time. Although facilities are charged for the product only when reports are run, they should not be selective about which patients they request reports for, Greenberg said, commenting that even though there may be budget considerations, using MedPoint for Hospitals for every patient adds value by helping hospitals meet their medication reconciliation goals and by reducing adverse drug events.

“Trusting the patient’s recollection is not sufficient when it comes to compiling a medication history,” Greenberg said. “When you use MedPoint for Hospitals, you maximize the speed, accuracy and security of prescription drug history data.”

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