Clinical Outcome and Cost Savings of Medication Reconciliation at Inpatient Department, Khao Suan Kwang Hospital, Khon Kaen Province

Abstract

This research aimed to study the preventable medication errors, cost savings by prescribing the returned medications in non-communicable disease patients and cost avoidance values by using medication reconciliation in the In-patient department, Khao Suan Kwang hospital, Khon Kaen Province, through the service provider’s perspective. This retrospective study. Collected the data from January 1^st to June³⁰ 2020. The sample size was 185. Descriptive analysis; namely, frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation were used to analyze the data. The findings showed that, in the total sample size of 185 patients there were 13 patients with at least 1 medication error during the admission (7.03%) and 4 patients before the discharge (2.16%). The total number of items use before the admission were 811 items and before the discharge were 1,038 items. There were 24 medication errors during the admission (2.96%) and 4 medication errors before discharge (0.39%). The medication errors were classified into 2 types; namely, omission error and wrong dose or frequency error. There were 22 omission errors during the admission (91.67%) and 2 errors before the discharge (50%). For the wrong dose or frequency errors, there were 2 errors during the admission (8.33%) and 2 errors before the discharge (50%). All medication errors were harmless to the patients and categorized into B and C levels. The cost saving by prescribing the returned medications was 20,259.89 Baht while the cost avoidance was 16,373.30 Baht. To conclude, medication reconciliation was a key element in reducing medication error which affected both patient safety and cost savings.