Accreditation

Joint Commission talks medication management

Briefings on Accreditation and Quality, December 1, 2018

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There was a far-ranging medication management discussion held at The Joint Commission’s 2019 Executive Briefings this September. Led by Robert Campbell, PharmD, a pharmacist with The Joint Commission’s Standards Interpretation Group, the panel covered everything from medication compounding, opioids and painkillers, and syringe use. At the end of the presentation, he answered questions from the audience.

Titration and ranges

The first question posed to Campbell was on titration: the process of determining what dose of a medication will grant a patient the most symptom reduction with the least amount of side effects. 

The attendee explained that she works in a hospital with eight critical care units. None of the units or physicians can agree what the titration ranges should be, she said, making it difficult to perform titration. She also noted the design of the hospital’s electronic medical record (EMR) when a titration order is created in the system—it changes the range settings for all the units.  

“I understand the rationale of the providers,” Campbell says. “An epinephrine drip on a cardiac post-hazard patient is much different than an epinephrine drip on a patient with brain damage.”

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