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Witry M, Klein DM, Suiter N, Pham K, Turvey CL. Medication list discrepancies and therapeutic duplications among Veterans using both VA and non-VA clinics. Poster session presented at: American Pharmacists Association Annual Meeting; 2015 Mar 27; San Diego, CA.
Up to 70% of veterans use both VHA and non-VHA providers to meet their health care needs. These providers may not have complete medication information as veterans or their caregivers often are called upon to construct the medication profile. The objective of this analysis is to describe the medication list discrepancies and therapeutic duplications between VHA and non-VHA provider medication lists. 10 VHA sites have been recruited for a study to test if veterans trained to download and bring their VA personal health record to clinic visits improves information consistency. For this analysis, research assistants at each site will export VHA medication lists and obtain medication lists from the veterans' non-VA clinics for up to 100 veterans. These lists will be complied and sent to the research team. A research assistant will clean the lists and overlap them where there is consistency. Medications on the lists will be analyzed using the following discrepancies with the VHA list as the "gold standard": Medication omission, medication addition, dose mismatch, frequency mismatch. Therapeutic duplications will be identified by a research pharmacist, noting if it is within or between medication lists. Top medications for each discrepancy will be reported. Medication lists are being collected now. Preliminary analyses of the first pairs suggest all four discrepancy types are common. Several between list therapeutic duplications which potentially could result in patient harm were identified, reinforcing the need for greater medication list consistency among providers.
