Determination of Fundamental Medication Reconciliation Features with an International Perspective.

Abstract

Medication reconciliation is a major part of clinical care transitions that can promote patient safety and satisfaction. The main administrators of this process are pharmacy practitioners. Currently, many medical centers all over the world implement the procedures of medication reconciliation with varying styles and inconsistent success. Some other centers are going to build protocols in the near future. By now, there is no consensus for an optimal method of running medication reconciliation and each center has its own approach. This fact can cause a huge amount of resource wastages. In this narrative review, we searched scientific literature in this field in order to extract, underline and formalize the specific features which help a medical center to reach an optimized medication reconciliation plan. We explored the PubMed database with keywords of "medication reconciliation" and "pharmacy service" to obtain a relevant reference pool for our topic. Then we checked the affiliations of authors to be assured of the international diversity of our perspective. Our search method yielded 184 journal articles from different continents. The frequency of published articles from America was higher and then, Europe, Australia, Asia and Africa were placed, respectively. According to the results, inclusion of factors like establishing phases for implementation, proper education, developing academic coordination, providing suitable facilities, specialization of the services, periodical evaluations and promoting pharmacy practice in the development of medication reconciliation will potentially lead to an optimized plan.