Hospital Experiences Using Electronic Health Records to Support Medication Reconciliation

Hospitals face increasing pressure to implement medication reconciliation—a systematic way to ensure accurate patient medication lists at admission, during a hospitalization and at discharge—to reduce errors and improve patient outcomes. Electronic health records (EHRs) can help standardize medication reconciliation, but data quality and technical and workflow issues continue to pose challenges to effective medication reconciliation in hospitals. The study, which examined how 19 hospitals across the United States were using EHRs to support medication reconciliation, found that EHR-based medication reconciliation implementation was in flux as EHR vendors added or enhanced capabilities and hospitals upgraded EHR products or switched vendors.