Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has compiled a useful list for anyone interested in issues concerning care transitions. The top 5 items listed are:

1. Hospital readmissions are a real problem.
2. Hospitals are paying the price for readmissions.
3. Patients and providers are both overwhelmed.
4. Hospitals and doctors’ offices need to talk to each other.
5. For patients, knowledge about their health = power.

To see the rest of the list and all the details, see this PDF on the RWJF website. 

“An old-fashioned checklist has the potential to keep patients with heart failure out of the hospital — and save Medicare billions of dollars, a small new study suggests.”

USA Today reports that a new study has shown that a simple checklist can significantly reduce the number of patients who are readmitted to a hospital within a month compared to regular discharge instructions. This cost effective patient education tool leads to improved compliance with medication therapy and helps save money and improve patient care.

Read the article here. 

A study by the University of California at San Diego Center for Transplantation examined the benefits of adding a pharmacist to their transplant programs, and the process of medication reconciliation. Several initiatives, including the use of MedActionPlan, were found to improve the safety and quality of care for patients. In addition, implementing MedActionPlan helps facilities meet the Medication Reconciliation requirement of the National Patient Safety Goals.

Read more about this study. 

MedActionPlan users who print the Weekly Checklist or Health Record for their patients will find a useful new feature available: you can now select which day the week starts with. Why would you want to do that? It could make it easier for the patient to use the tool, and save you a sheet of paper in the process.

For example, perhaps you have a patient being discharged on a Wednesday, with a follow-up appointment in one week. With the old version of the Checklist and Health Record, you would need to print two sheets for each: one for the remaining days in the first week, and another for the first few days of the next week. And each page would have several columns left unused, which could be confusing for some patients. With the new feature, you can print a single page beginning on the day of discharge. 

Selecting the first day of the week is a simple one-step process: simply click on the day along the top of the Checklist or Health Record. Your selection on one page will be applied to all the pages. Just click on SUN (Sunday) to go back to the default.

MedActionPlan for Medication Reconciliation is a new premium service that adds sophisticated new tools to MedActionPlan programs. With this innovative solution, a facility easily documents each patient’s medications, recording when each is started, stopped, or continued. It also notes the provider and the reason for every change. This application provides an efficient, comprehensive medication reconciliation solution for hospitals adhering to the Joint Commission’s National Patient Safety Goals.

In addition to all the great features currently available in version 5.0, MedActionPlan for Medication Reconciliation includes special features to help create an efficient, flexible workflow for each facility. With new HL7 support, MedActionPlan can now interface with your existing EMR, admissions, labs, or other information systems, reducing double entry and saving time throughout your system.

For pricing and a free demonstration of MedActionPlan for Medication Reconciliation, please call us at 800-543-2230.