Both the EHR and docs’ judgment required for medication reconciliation

For all the time and work involved in training doctors to use the electronic health record (EHR) to document care, the benefits are many. For one, the EHR has a pivotal role to play in medication reconciliation, which can be particularly helpful with elderly patients and those who may have a substance abuse problem.

The beauty of many EHRs today is physicians often have access to information about medications prescribed to their patients by other providers--and that allows doctors to reach out to patients and their families to determine the right course of treatment, writes Fred N. Pelzman, M.D., of Weill Cornell Internal Medicine Associates in MedPageToday

But far more than an EHR is required when it comes to medication reconciliation, according to Pelzman, who notes that physicians still need to rely on their judgement and communication skills, the same way they always have. What the EHR does is provide access to far more information than ever before.

In the case of one of his elderly patients, Pelzman discovered within the EHR’s medication reconciliation feature that she was being prescribed a number of other medications. He then called his patient’s daughter and discovered that his patient was seeing a different doctor who was prescribing another set of medications to treat her blood pressure, asthma and diabetes--in addition to those he had prescribed.

“These systems give us insight into the care our patients receive beyond the boundaries of our office walls,” he writes. “While they often are a lot of noise, duplicates generated by pharmacies and insurers feeding data into the system, sometimes they can open up our eyes to things that are happening in the lives of our patients that we never even considered.”