Home Health & Hospice Week

Home care patients ideally suited for a pharmacist's help, project finds. If you're looking for an innovative way to cut hospital readmissions, you might want to add a visiting pharmacist to your staff. In a one-of-a-kind pilot project, the Uni-versity of Minnesota and the Minnesota Visiting Nurse Agency teamed up to send a pharmacist into home care patients' homes to evaluate their medications, reports the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune. The university and VNA have made the program permanent after its initial success. Of 70 patients with complete records in the program, hospitalizations were cut from 32 to 16 and emergency room visits from 16 to eight, reports the pharmacist in the project, Shannon Reidt. Reidt gives patients suggestions to help them comply with their medication regimens. She also recommends drug changes to doctors and makes suggestion to the agency's nurses and family caregivers. "Sometimes they take the drug wrong or have [...]