Home Medicine Reviews every two years
The Primary Health Care Research & Information Service (PHCRIS) has produced a review of the Home Medicine Review (HMR) program. The main change to the program in 2014 was the requirement of a minimum two year interval between reviews to be conducted for a particular patient. This change has come following the increased uptake of HMRs which began at the end of 2012, and caused the HMR program to exceed its allocated budget by $4.2 million in 2013.
A clear need for the HMR program has been established, with approximately 2-3% of hospital admissions being medication related, at an estimated cost of $1.2 billion annually. It is estimated that 50% of these admissions are preventable, highlighting the need for the minimisation of medication errors.
PHCRIS has also looked at the evidence for other ways of preventing medication errors. This included the possibility of a Hospital-Initiated Medication Review (HIMR) for those patients who are discharged from hospital and are at risk of medication misadventure.
Follow the links for a previous two-part series of articles about Home Medicine Reviews from 2013: