Medication Safety and Adverse Drug Events (ADE)

Medications are the number one treatment administered to patients in our hospitals and significantly impact care and outcomes. CMS has requested all hospitals in the Partnership for Patients program report on Adverse Drug Events in three areas: opioids, anticoagulants, and hypoglycemic agents. The Tennessee Pharmacists Coalition is dedicated to assisting hospitals in improvement for these three adverse drug event areas as well as in medication reconciliation/readmissions and antibiotic resistance/antibiotic stewardship.

In an effort to align both education and reporting on ADEs, THA and the Tennessee Pharmacist Coalition have identified measures for ADE reporting that will be utilized for the THA HEN facilities as well as all Tennessee facilities. The THA Board of Directors has endorsed the following recommendations to foster medication safety in Tennessee:

• All hospitals should have a multidisciplinary medication safety team in place.
• All hospitals should report on the non-mandatory ADE measures identified by the Tennessee Pharmacists Coalition and reported through the Tennessee Center for Patient Safety at the Tennessee Hospital Association.

We encourage all Tennessee hospitals to participate in measuring and sharing your ADE data for establishing a statewide benchmark for these ADE focus areas. To support this work, we have developed an ADE educational plan to include sharing of best practices.