Why Does My Doctor Need to Know All My Medications?

Medication Management is identified as the most common patient safety concern in the United States.

Many people are seen in multiple health care settings like a hospital, emergency room or specialists’ office. In each setting medications can be prescribed or updated by the health care provider and can be recorded in multiple patient health records.  There is not one universal system for all health records and many health record systems don’t “talk” to each other, nor do they “cross-over information”. This makes it difficult for a health care provider to have an accurate and complete list of medications a patient is taking to ensure there are no medication errors or dangerous interactions. Medication Management is identified as the most common patient safety concern in the United States.

Approximately 70% of Americans (40% are seniors) take at least one prescription drug and more than four billion prescriptions are filled in U.S. pharmacies each year. This percentage does not include over-the-counter medicines or natural supplements.

When a patient is seen in a variety of settings, this is often called “transition of care”.  Because of these transitions for services, your local primary care provider may or may not have the most current list of medications in your primary care health record.  The risk of not following a proper medication regimen, unknowingly mixing non-compatible drugs or mixing over-the-counter medicines can result in serious health complications.

Bring in your meds to every visit

Your Estes Park Health Physician Clinic practitioners want to partner with you to ensure your safety by updating your health record to reflect all the medications – prescription, over-the-counter and supplements – that you take. Our Physician Clinic staff believes the most reliable way for them to help you with Medication Management, is to have you bring all your medicine bottles to each appointment.  A member of your health care team will compare those bottles to your current health record and will confirm an accurate medication list before you see your doctor. If there are meds you should get rid of, Estes Park Health has a Medication Take-Back Station onsite to help you get rid of drugs you’re no longer using.

Bring in your medications and get a free tote

To help you transport your medications from home to an appointment and back home again, we are offering an Estes Park Health tote bag to each patient who brings in their medicine bottles.  Consider this our gift for partnering with us to ensure your Medication Management safety.

Estes Park Health will be moving to the Epic Electronic Health Record system in November 2019. Epic has great advantages: A single patient database; availability of patient data from any healthcare organization that uses Epic; interoperability with the hospitals to which we send most of our patient transfers. Epic customers exchange over 2.3 million patient records per day and approximately two-thirds of the people in the United States have a current Electronic Health Record (EHR) in Epic.