Integrated medicines management

Integrated medicines management

‘Integrated medicines management’ is a term that has been used to describe bringing together several elements of clinical pharmacy services which have been shown to be effective in dealing with medicines management problems, delivering additional input at key phases of a patient’s stay: admission, inpatient monitoring and counselling and discharge. By focusing additional clinical pharmacy input to selected patients (that is, those taking at least four medicines, those on defined highrisk medicines, patients 65 years or older and on antidepressants, and those with a previous admission within the last 6 months), reduced length of stay and a decreased rate of readmission have been demonstrated, providing efficiency savings to the health economy in addition to improved clinical outcomes for patients.