Last week, AMCP hosted their annual meeting virtually amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Over 4,000 managed care professionals joined online to discuss current trends and ongoing challenges within the industry. The focal point of this year’s conference was the issue of medication errors. The National Coordinating Council for Medication Error and Prevention defines medication errors as “any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm, while the medication is in control of the health care professional or the patient.”1 According to AMCP, medication errors are among the most common medical errors, harming at least 1.5 million people every year. Extra medical costs, as a result of medication errors, total over $3.5 billion per year.
In managed care, medication errors are detrimental to achieving quality outcomes and higher value-based payments. Errors commonly result from missing information about co-prescribed medications and incorrect drug or duplicate medication selection at medication reconciliation. Medication errors also occur when prescribing an extremely complex regimen like those involved in chemotherapy. At AMCP 2021, managed care professionals looked for solutions that could help solve these preventable errors. Attendees stopped by the Groove Health booth to learn about our medication management tools, discuss how our platform helps decrease the occurrence of medication errors, and discover the impact of our solution on pharmacy teams and their patients.
With Groove Health, pharmacy teams receive up-to-date medication lists directly from the electronic health record and have the ability to de-select any duplicates or incorrect medications. From there, the care team syncs the medication list directly to the patient’s smartphone, ensuring that both the patient and the care team have the accurate medication list. The Groove Health mobile app provides patients with all the medication management tools they need to stay on track, including patient education, medication reminders, and symptom tracking. Also, if the Groove Health app identifies two drugs in a patient’s regimen, a drug-to-drug interaction alert is sent to both the patient and care team, helping to eliminate any preventable adverse events. With medication errors being a common and costly occurrence in the pharmacy space, Groove Health has built technology to prevent these errors and help managed care pharmacists achieve better outcomes for their patients.
(1) National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention. (2015, January 30). About Medication Errors. NCC MERP. Retrieved from https://www.nccmerp.org/about-medication-errors
