Health information exchanges can offer physicians a more accurate list of a patient's current medications than medication histories recorded by emergency department clinicians, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
Researchers compared medication lists in 613 patients' emergency department charts across two teaching hospitals with their medication lists obtained through information exchanges with public insurers.
About 42 percent more medications were identified through the information exchange than through the ED chart. Patients taking more than 12 medications were the most likely to have a medication missing from the ED chart.
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