Reducing hospital admissions for adverse drug events through coordinated pharmacist care: learning from Hawaii without a field trip

Adverse drug events among older adults are common and serious. Approximately 9% of all hospital admissions for older adults are attributable to adverse drug reactions.1 Moreover, up to one in five adults experience an adverse drug reaction during hospitalisation,2 3 and approximately 15%–50% of hospitalised older adults will suffer an adverse drug event within 30 days of returning home (with most of these events resulting from medications that were started in the hospital).4–6 If our goal is primum non nocere ('first, do no harm'), we have substantial opportunities for improvement.

A variety of interventions have been attempted to stem this tide of medication-induced harm, with variable success, and no clear path for hitting the sweet spot of meaningfully improving clinical outcomes related to medication use in a manner than is clinically scalable and cost-effective.7–12

http://bit.ly/2RwGOgS