I complete medication reconciliations on all two day post- discharge calls I make and the number of medication discrepancies I come across is astonishing. Most recently, I called a patient that was discharged from a skilled nursing facility with an illegibly, hand written medication list. This was a heart failure patient who had been started …show more content…
One of the largest trials to date occurred in North Carolina. North Carolina rolled out a state wide transitional care initiate in 2008 to evaluate the effectiveness of transitional care interventions in reducing hospital readmissions and improving patient outcomes. They enlisted 21, 375 Medicaid patients with complex chronic medical conditions discharged between July 2010- June 2011 in hospitals across the state. They divided the patients into two groups, a transitional care group and a usual care group. The transitional group received a number of transitional care interventions, including the ones I have mentioned in this article while the usual group received normal patient care. The findings showed that one readmission was averted for every six patients who received transitional care (Jackson, et al,