Investigating the inaccuracies of blood pressure medications: Week 7
Swagat D -
It’s finally April, and as spring is starting to bloom with flowers, my work is starting to bloom with solutions to medication inaccuracies.
How’s it going, everyone! This week fulfills a promise I made to myself, finding solutions to medication inaccuracies. This is the sole reason why I’m conducting my research, as simple documentation often builds into something great and beautiful when nurtured properly. It’s been on my mind so much now, and I have some potential solutions.
First, let’s talk about fixing medication inaccuracies from the doctor’s side. At Southwest Kidney Institute, we use the software AthenaOne, which integrates multiple parts of nephrology and labs into one software. While I overall like this software, there are some issues that should be addressed.
One of the most common medication inaccuracies is duplicate medications, which are very unnecessary if the patients don’t have different dosages of that same medication. Another common type of medication inaccuracy I see is short-term medications not being removed from the list. One solution is to add an alert function that notifies the medical assistant or doctor of a duplicate medication (I can’t provide a screenshot due to legal reasons). If the duplicate is not a mistake, there should be a function to disable the alert. Another way to solve this is to have AthenaOne show what class of medication it is, such as beta blockers and ACE inhibitors. This way, medical assistants and doctors can be conveniently able to analyze whether the patient needs a certain medication or shouldn’t be on it at all.
As for the patient’s side, I have a few solutions. First is allowing SWI to have access to your medication authorization history. What this does is enable other firms and people to update the medication list so that an accurate list can be updated every time a patient comes to the doctor’s office. Although there are a few bugs and it can be pretty slow, it’s better to give consent to the firm. Otherwise, like I said in Week 2’s blog, they have to manually call the office and keep telling them any updates with their medications. Although some people prefer to do the latter, I’ve only seen a few instances of that actually happening, and many seniors generally struggle with technology, so they often leave us in the dark unintentionally.
The solutions I’ve described above aren’t a comprehensive list nor can be fixed soon. Changing the code of the software like AthenaOne takes a lot of time, and with its bugs, it isn’t perfect. It’ll take time for the code to even update with my modifications, and with it will come a lot of more software issues. As for the patients, we can’t change the mindset of people’s prioritization of health, but we can make their medication lists easier by providing them some and creating goals for them to accomplish.
This was my most jam-packed blog, and I thank you very much if you read it all. See you next week!