THE accuracy of patients’ medication allergy documentation for severe allergies in My Health Record (MHR) is low, creating risk of harm from inadvertent re-exposure to allergenic medications, recent research from Alfred Health suggests.
A research team comprising specialists, pharmacy and nursing staff set out to investigate the accuracy and completeness of documentation in MHR of confirmed medication-related anaphylaxis and severe cutaneous adverse drug reactions (SCAR), and to determine barriers and facilitators to documentation.
They looked at allergy documentation for 88 patients who had been referred to a multidisciplinary Adverse Drug Reaction Review Committee (ADRRC) and/or allergy clinic, and who had an accessible MHR.
The overall accuracy of MHR was 15.9%, with anaphylaxis reactions more likely to have accurate documentation than SCAR (25% versus 5% respectively).
Similarly, there were higher rates of accurate documentation when allergic events were followed up in an allergy clinic, and when the reaction was life-threatening.
The authors speculated that this may be due to patients being more likely to remember the information, and because the additional contact triggers a second round of correspondence to GPs about critical allergy history.
Of the patients who did not have accurate MHR allergy documentation, 28% had the information available in an uploaded discharge summary, but not in the prominently displayed and easily accessible MHR allergy section.
The paper’s authors provided suggestions for improving the accuracy of documentation, including the use of hospital electronic medical record software that allows data from discharge summaries and event summaries to be uploaded automatically to the MHR allergy section.
They also noted that very few patients with validated severe allergic reactions are reporting this themselves on MHR, and suggested that “central to ensuring safer use of medicines is for patients to be empowered to use this new health technology”.
“Increasing uptake of digital health, such as the MHR, brings opportunities to enhance patient care, but it is equally important to evaluate that its functionality is fit-for-purpose and user-friendly,” wrote the authors.
“Where the culprit medication for a severe allergic reaction has been determined, communication of this information to an individual and their treating team via a shared platform, such as MHR, is vital,” they added.
The paper was published in Australian Health Review HERE. KB
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