Making sense of diseases in medication reconciliation

• Published in: Cognition, technology & work technology & work, 2011-06, Vol.13 (2), p.151-158
• Main Authors: Vashitz, Geva, Nunnally, Mark E., Bitan, Yuval, Parmet, Yisrael, O’Connor, Michael F., Cook, Richard I.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aerospace Technology and Astronautics; Automotive Engineering; Cognition & reasoning; Cognitive Psychology; Computer Science; Health care delivery; Heuristic; Industrial and Organizational Psychology; Medical diagnosis; Medical errors; Medicine/Public Health; Original Research; Transitions; User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction
• ISSN: 1435-5558; 1435-5566
• DOI: 10.1007/s10111-010-0162-3

Patients are most at risk during transitions in care across settings and providers. The communication and reconciliation of an accurate medication list throughout the care continuum are essential in the reduction in transition-related adverse drug events. Most current research focuses on the outcomes of reconciliation interventions, yet not on the clinician’s perspective. We aimed to explore clinicians’ cognitive processes and heuristics of making sense of patients’ disease histories. We used the affinity diagram method to simulate real-life medication reconciliation with 24 clinicians. The participants were given paper cards with diseases and medications representing a real case from an anesthesiology department. The task was to sort the cards in a set that made sense to the clinician. The experiment was video-recorded, and the data were analyzed using a quantitative spatial analysis technique. Levene’s test for equality of variance showed that 79% of the 24 participants arranged the diseases along a straight line ( p