• E-mail
• Print
• RSS

Assessing medication management risks essential to drug safety of hospital program

Accreditation Connection, June 4, 2007

Because it's the final medication management (MM) standard and surveyors don't commonly cite hospitals for noncompliance of it, MM.8.10 tends to get overlooked by some hospitals, according to Thirsa Martinez, PharmD, MPA, COL, MS, director of the department of pharmacy at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.

"MM.8.10 really should be the first MM standard," Martinez says. "Everything you do as part of your MM program needs to be evaluated for risk points, because those risk points tie into favorable outcomes."

MM.8.10, which requires the evaluation of a hospital's MM system, is simple enough in theory with six EPs. But setting up a system that accurately reflects all of the risk points medication brings to a hospital and where you can improve [EP 1] can be time consuming, Martinez says.

"It has to be an ongoing system where you are looking at trend issues and where reports, literature, and technology are trending [EP 3]," she advises. "Identifying opportunities for improving safety [EP 2] means taking a close look at each individual standard and making a list of every risk you can think of."

Access the full story in the May issue of Briefings on The Joint Commission; access is free for subscribers, nonsubscribers can sign up for a 30-day free trial of BOJExtra! or purchase a copy of the story for $10 by clicking here.

• E-mail to a Colleague
• Print
• RSS
• Archive