Keith Farrar

@Jaione Hi Jaione, this is a problem in many countries. Healthcare IT systems are often developed to meet the need of different sectors (primary care and secondary / tertiary care) and are developed by different companies to meet different needs. Indeed there is often a problem even within the same organisation (such as a hospital) where a system to support Intensive Care or Theatre or Chemotherapy is developed separately from (and does not communicate with) the system used to support care in the rest of the hospital. Many hospital systems support the capture of a list of medicines on admission but I agree that this is seldom available as an electronic communication between primary care and secondary care systems, which would be the ideal. The NHS is now working to improve this 'interoperability' between systems, insisting on the use of a standard way of describing the medicine so that the prescription information can pass between systems. The use of Open standards is actually the best way of ensuring that information can be seamlessly transferred between systems but, whilst there is growing interest in this, we are a long way from systems routinely using this process. A short-term solution might be to work with your system supplier to see if a scan of the barcode on the medicines the patient brings in could then generate a list of medicines on admission ... but this may not provide a comprehensive list and may be prone to error if the medicines brought with the patient included medicines that had been discontinued or even prescribed for someone else in the household and so a well informed individual is needed to support this reconciliation process until we can make progress towards truly interoperable systems. This is both possible and available (I think the Dutch have a 'shared' medication record between primary and secondary care) and would be quicker and cheaper than replacing the systems we have with a 'universal' system (which would probably struggle to meet the needs of all users). Good luck!