No matter their specialty, all providers know that managing medications effectively is a key component in keeping patients safe. This can be a challenge, especially when different systems — like pharmacy databases, electronic health records (EHRs) and hospitals — don’t always talk to each other.
These disconnects leave care teams without a full picture of patients’ medication histories, too often leading to avoidable errors, duplicate prescriptions, and, potentially, serious health complications.
How Connie Is Addressing Medication Reconciliation and Polypharmacy
In Connecticut alone, more than 300 different EHRs maintain unique medication lists for their patients. Without proper data sharing, providers may struggle to access accurate information, making it challenging to effectively monitor patients’ use of multiple medications to treat a single condition, or polypharmacy. This hindered coordination can lead to issues such as incorrect dosages and unnecessary prescriptions.
Medication reconciliation — the process of gathering and consolidating medication information — plays a critical role in addressing risks by ensuring providers have access to accurate, up-to-date information. Without proper medication reconciliation, the risks associated with polypharmacy are heightened.
Connie’s new Medication Management Tool — now available to HIE participants across Connecticut — makes it much easier to track prescriptions, ensuring better accuracy, reducing duplication, and ultimately improving patient outcomes.
How Does the Medication Management Tool Work?
The Medication Management Tool leverages Connie’s unique interoperability to compile prescribed data from hospitals, clinics, and healthcare facilities, giving providers a streamlined list of a patient’s current and historical medications and the most recent dosing details.
By leveraging a proprietary deduplication algorithm, the Medication Management Tool streamlines the viewing experience, providing an overview that’s easier to digest in clinical workflows. Each medication is presented with important details such as dose, prescriber, and changes in history. Clinicians can also leverage the tool to check for potential drug-drug or drug-allergy interactions across patients’ care teams.
Understanding the Benefits of the New Medication Management Tool
Many patients with chronic conditions can see multiple providers in a single month. A cancer patient, for example, may have data from their primary care physician, an oncologist, a dietician, and a pain management specialist, just to name a few. Putting the patient in charge of remembering and managing their own medication list can exacerbate polypharmacy risks.
Even for the experts, medication reconciliation can be a real headache: It’s time-consuming for providers and can be unreliable. Connie’s Medication Management Tool relieves this burden by automatically consolidating medication data and accurately removing duplicates as best as possible.
Built for Connecticut, by Connecticut
The Medication Management Tool is a direct product of Connecticut’s commitment to solving these major challenges. Developed by Connie, the tool builds upon the work of the Medication Reconciliation and Polypharmacy Work Group, per Connecticut General Assembly’s Special Act 18-6.
The impact is clear. From January through December 2023, duplicated prescriptions shared through Connie were significantly reduced for approximately 3.1 million patients across Connecticut, with medication lines decreased from 187.6 million to 21.5 million.
Bottom line, more providers are now able to benefit from accessing the same consolidated list of medications, significantly reducing the risk of adverse health outcomes due to medication mismanagement.
Even with the success we’ve seen in Connecticut, we know medication reconciliation will continue to be one of the biggest challenges in healthcare. Collectively, we all want to take better care of our patients. With the support of Connecticut and the healthcare community, we’re on our way to making that happen and working to extend this tool into a much-needed realm: pharmacies and filled medications.
Visit our website to learn more about the Medication Management Tool, access training videos and learn how Connie is making a difference in Connecticut.