Written by A recent initiative by Washington State University (WSU) has demonstrated significant success in improving patient safety and reducing hospitalizations by tackling a pervasive issue in home health care: medication list discrepancies.
It is estimated that 90% of patients receiving care at home have at least one difference between their official medication list and what they are actually taking, making it more likely they will require rehospitalization. In fact, past studies have established that those with unreconciled medications are more than twice as likely to be hospitalized. Since home health-care agencies, unlike hospitals or urgent care centers, typically do not have clinical pharmacists involved in patient care, a team from WSU’s College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences set out to fill this crucial gap.
To address this challenge, the WSU team developed a quality improvement project focused on medication optimization. The methods centered on combining interdisciplinary teamwork, specialized training, and a new reconciliation tool.
Over the course of about a year, a pharmacist-led interdisciplinary team developed training modules and the new tool, which was essentially a detailed checklist covering 13 different scenarios where medication lists might be unreconciled. The core aim was to train in-home clinicians, such as nurses, physical therapists, and occupational therapists, to “think like a pharmacist”.
During a 10-week period following the completion of the training, hospitalizations for high-risk heart failure patients were cut from 23.4% to 11.4%, a reduction of more than half. This result was especially strong for the cohort of patients with two or more unreconciled medications, a group that was three times more likely to be hospitalized within 30 days at baseline.
Furthermore, the project saw a sustainable reduction in rehospitalizations among all patients, decreasing from 13.55% to 11.9% over a 17-month period. The findings of this project, which was supported by a grant from Pfizer, were published in the journal Home Health Care Now.
Read the entire article at https://news.wsu.edu/press-release/2025/10/15/wsu-project-reduces-hospitalizations-among-home-health-care-patients/