Engineering a foundation for partnership to improve medication safety during care transitions

There are major gaps and barriers for patients and caregivers after hospital discharge to achieve safe medication use. Patients and caregivers are often not ready to take on the responsibility for medication management when transitioned from inpatient care. Current approaches tend to focus on adding isolated strategies. A system thinking can enable a fundamental transformation to redesign professionals’ interactions with patients and caregivers with an explicit goal to develop patients and caregivers into true partners, with targeted roles, skills, attitude, knowledge, and tool support. We must recognize the fact that medication safety during care transition and, more so, at patient homes is the property of a “work system”, in which the patient and caregivers are at the center, with collaboration with health professionals. Innovative ideas are needed to engineer work system components by systematically examining professionals’ interactions with patients and caregivers, such as those during hospital stays and transitions (e.g. follow-up phone calls, community pharmacist consults, and home visits). Based on human factors principles, we describe a set of recommendations on engineering partnership with patients and their caregivers at different stages of a care episode, to enable productive interactions among work systems that are distributed and are often limited in their ability to exchange information and co-align their interests.