Designing to Promote Comprehension of Patients’ Current Medications -Pharmacy Notebook

Excerpt

I read with great interest Green and colleague’s deprescribing intervention for patients with dementia and multiple chronic conditions.¹ In addition to the risk of polypharmacy such as increasing their risk of adverse drug events, another problem could be difficulty for providers to know which medications patients are taking, especially when they need to go to multiple specialties. While electronic medical records can improve patients’ care since it increases the transparency between health care providers and pharmacists,² it does not involve the patients themselves, which is not helpful in improving patients’ participation and understanding of their treatment plan. In addition, health care providers could not recognize what patients are actually taking at home. …