InterMedHx, Inc. introduces RxHx, a new ground-breaking tool for automating the first step of the medication reconciliation process: retrieving accurate home prescription medication histories.

The task of medication reconciliation, if performed at all, is difficult and costly. As a first step, hospital providers are tasked with obtaining a list of a patient's current home medications, health supplements, and allergies at time of registration. A practitioner must verify the patient's medication history along with the name, dosage, frequency and route of each medication. Verification can take more than 20 minutes to perform. Patients are often unable to remember or unwilling to divulge the names and dosages of their medications such that family members, physicians, and pharmacies must be contacted.

This time-consuming process is now a JCAHO imperative. Given current personnel shortages, providers are further challenged to meet today's medication reconciliation mandates in a cost-effective and accurate manner. InterMedHx's RxHx is here to address this challenge.

Prescription medication use has been significantly increasing. Currently, over 66% of health care visits to physician offices, hospital outpatient and emergency departments involve drug therapy, with an average of 1.7 drugs ordered per visit. This amounts to more than 2.8 billion prescriptions written in the United States each year.

Unfortunately, as the number of prescriptions being written increases, so does the chance for these drugs to interact with each other. Studies have shown that when two to four different drugs are taken, the potential for interaction is 6%. That risk increases to 50% with five drugs and to almost 100% with eight drugs.

In January of 2000, the Institute of Medicine reported that an estimated 7,000 deaths occur due to adverse drug reactions each year. That estimate has increased significantly since then. Other studies estimate that 6.7% of hospitalized patients have a serious adverse drug reaction with a fatality rate of 0.32%.  Assuming that these estimates are correct, then there are more than 2,216,000 serious adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients each year. An AHRQ report estimates that treatment for ADRs during hospitalization costs between $1.56 and $5.6 billion annually and that 39-49% of these ADRs are due to physician ordering errors. So how can this ADRs be prevented? We at InterMedHx can't answer that - at least not yet, but we do feel that it makes sense to start the process with the most accurate and comprehensive medication information possible. That's why we developed RxHx.

• RxHx is designed to function as step 1 in the medication reconciliation process by providing an accurate list of a patient's home prescription medications. To do this, RxHx starts with the registration process. The provider's registration process automatically triggers RxHx to query participating source medication databases, including pharmacies, payers, and pharmacy benefit managers (PBM). RxHx extracts available medication data, including drug names, dosage, route, and frequency, and prints a personalized medication report - all within minutes of the initial registration.
  

• RxHx vastly improves the accuracy and completeness of a patient's medication record. Each medication is reproduced exactly as shown in the source database. without modification or abbreviation. An attending practictioner can easily review the report with the patient to verify the content and check for any OTC medications, physician samples, and health supplements taken.
  

• RxHx is a powerful productivity enhancer as well. The 20 minutes or so it typically takes to gather medication information for each patient can be reduced to a few minutes and completed before the patient is shown to a treatment room. With today's growing nursing and pharmacist shortages, RxHx can enable a provider to reallocate valuable professional time to other tasks and functions which, in turn, can further reduce medical errors.

Disclaimer: RxHx reports do not in any way constitute medication reconciliation forms or replace the assessing practitioner’s responsibility for reviewing all listed medications (prescription and OTC), health supplements, and allergies with the patient. Furthermore, neither InterMedHx nor its content sources provide any representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the medication history information provided.