title: Comparison of electronic pharmacy prescription records with manually collected medication histories in an emergency department.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Medication history is an essential part of patient assessment in emergency care. Patient-reported medication history can be incomplete. We study whether an electronic pharmacy-sourced prescription record can supplement the patient-reported history.
  
  
  METHODS
  In a community hospital, we compared the patient-reported history obtained by triage nurses to a proprietary electronic pharmacy record in all emergency department (ED) patients during 3 months.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Of 9,426 triaged patients, 5,001 (53%) had at least 1 (mean 7.7) prescription medication in the full-year electronic pharmacy record. Counting only recent prescription medications (supply lasting to at least 7 days before the ED visit), 3,688 patients (39%) had at least 1 (mean 4.0) recent medication. After adjustment for possible false-positive results, recent electronic prescription medication record enriched the patient-reported history by 28% (adding 1.1 drugs per patient). However, only 60% of patients with any active prescription medications from either source had any recent prescription medications in their electronic pharmacy record.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The electronic pharmacy prescription record augments the manually collected history.
authors.affiliation: Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.
authors.forename: Kin Wah
authors.initials: KW
authors.lastname: Fung
authors.forename: Mehmet
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kayaalp
authors.forename: Fiona
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Callaghan
authors.forename: Clement J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: McDonald
mesh_terms: D055695:Electronic Prescribing / Q000592:standards / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D004636:Emergency Service, Hospital / Q000592:standards / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006764:Hospitals, Community; D006801:Humans; D008396:Maryland; D008487:Medical History Taking / Q000706:statistics & numerical data