Rockville, Md., and Boston, Mass., June 18, 2020 – Adverse drug events (ADEs) caused by medication discrepancies are estimated to affect as many as 40% of hospitalized patients and up to 17% of patients in the 30 days following discharge and yet are largely underreported in all care settings. To tackle this challenge head-on, DrFirst and the Society for Hospital Medicine’s MARQUIS Med Rec Collaborative have formed a new partnership that is helping hospitals improve the quality of their medication reconciliation process, one of the most important steps to improving medication safety during transitions in care.
DrFirst is a pioneer in technology, support, and services that connect people at touchpoints of patient care. Its products are used by more than 1,400 hospitals and nearly half of the electronic health record (EHRs) systems in the U.S. and Canada. The MARQUIS Med Rec Collaborative is a quality initiative of the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM), originally designed and evaluated as part of two studies funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
Through the partnership, DrFirst will provide hospitals and ambulatory clinicians that use its MedHx solution with evidence-based tools to prescribe, document, and reconcile medications accurately and reduce ADEs. MedHx, the healthcare industry’s broadest source of medication history data available, yields faster, more accurate medication reconciliation.
Building on insights gained from the 2018 Multi-Center Medication Reconciliation Quality Improvement Study (MARQUIS), which demonstrated a consistent 9% reduction in medication history discrepancies per month, DrFirst will customize the Collaborative’s current toolkit. Specifically, DrFirst will illustrate how its MedHx solution can be combined with best practices in medication history-taking to achieve breakthrough reductions in medication discrepancies. After the customized toolkit is distributed and implemented, the MARQUIS Collaborative will take a cohort of DrFirst hospital clients through a 14-month quality improvement program.
“On average, there are as many as three medication reconciliation errors per hospital patient, often resulting in ADEs,” said Jeffrey Schnipper, MD, MPH, and MARQUIS principal investigator. “Nowhere else in healthcare do we tolerate error rates this high. We can’t advance further in medication safety until we get the medication history right. The MARQUIS Collaborative med rec toolkits are an excellent step in the right direction to create a single source of truth for patients’ medications.”
SHM’s MARQUIS Med Rec Collaborative, which measures “unintentional medication discrepancies per patient” for quality improvement purposes, is endorsed by the National Quality Forum (NQF) and is the official Leapfrog measure for medication reconciliation. The Collaborative is helping hospitals nationwide reduce unintentional medication discrepancies that lead to adverse drug events and patient harm. Participating hospitals identify medication reconciliation process gaps, develop and implement better ways to prescribe and document medications, and measure improvement over time.
“It’s critically important that clinicians have accurate and usable medication histories to help protect patients from dangerous ADEs and save time tracking down and typing in information, which can introduce errors,” said G. Cameron Deemer, president of DrFirst. “As part of our long-standing promise to help improve patient safety through technology, we are committed to working with MARQUIS to help clinicians follow best practices that improve their medication reconciliation quality.”
Medication reconciliation is a critical patient safety process. When done well, it significantly lessens the risk of adverse drug events. The process is recommended every time a patient has a transition of care, such as being admitted or discharged from a hospital. Accurate medication reconciliation is a National Patient Safety Goal of The Joint Commission.
DrFirst’s MedHx includes patented SmartSig artificial intelligence (AI) that improves the quality of prescription information and takes away manual errors when it is imported into EHRs used by hospitals and physician practices. SmartSig AI solves a long-standing problem concerning patients’ medication histories in EHRs: inferring or converting “free text” in prescribing directions (called sigs) into the nomenclature and data fields a hospital or ambulatory care center EHR uses. MedHx is foundational to DrFirst’s Med Rec Excellence program, which provides the most comprehensive, clean, and consumable medication history data available in healthcare.
About SHM
Representing the fastest-growing specialty in modern healthcare, the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM) is the leading medical society for hospitalists and their patients. To learn more, visit hospitalmedicine.org.
About DrFirst
Since 2000, DrFirst has pioneered healthcare technology solutions and consulting services that securely connect people at touchpoints of care to improve patient outcomes. We create unconventional solutions that solve care collaboration, medication management, price transparency, and adherence challenges faced in healthcare. We unite the Healthiverse—the interconnected healthcare universe—by providing our clients with real-time access to the information they need, exactly when and how they need it, so patients get the best care possible. DrFirst solutions are used by nearly 300,000 healthcare professionals, including more than 100,000 prescribers, nearly half of the EHRs in the U.S., and more than 1,400 hospitals in the U.S. and Canada. To learn more, visit DrFirst.com or @DrFirst.
