Rethinking the Outpatient Medication List: Increasing Patient Activation and Education While Architecting for Centralization and Improved Medication Reconciliation.

Abstract

An effective means to achieve an accurate, up-to-date medication list for patients cared for in multiple clinical institutions and care circumstances have yet to be developed. Research thus far has focused on approaches by individual clinical institutions to obtain the "best possible medication list." While a centralized, inclusive list is often pointed to as the "gold standard," little has been accomplished in envisioning what such a list would look like and how it would fit into the current infrastructure of healthcare. Further, most proposed solutions to medication lists within individual institutions have been without formalized patient input. Using InfoSAGE, an existing private social network for elder care management, we have outlined a means whereby both patient and trusted healthcare proxy can participate in establishing and maintaining an inclusive and up-to-date list of medications. We hypothesize that by employing the least well-utilized resource in healthcare, the patient, we can increase the accuracy and usefulness of the patient's medication list. Utilizing techniques to encourage patient activation and education in medication list management, we present the groundwork for developing such a list.