Do interventions that support medication continuity improve medication continuity and reduce hospital readmission in older people?
Interventions that bridge care transitions through self-management, telephone follow-up, and medication reconciliation are effective in supporting medication continuity and reducing hospital readmissions in older patients.
our results suggest that interventions that best support older patients' medication continuity are those that bridge transitions; these also have the greatest impact on reducing hospital readmission. Interventions that included self-management, telephone follow-up and medication reconciliation activities were most likely to be effective; however, further research needs to identify how to meaningfully engage with patients and caregivers to best support post-discharge medication continuity. Limitations included high subjectivity of intervention coding, study heterogeneity and resource restrictions.
Tomlinson et al. (Tue,) studied this question.