The Cognitive Task of Medication Reconciliation - Clinicians’ Approaches to the Arrangement of Medical Condition and Medication History Information

We report the results of a study which aims to improve our understanding of how clinicians make sense of medication and disease information (medical reconciliation), performed by clinicians in a major US hospital. A card sorting simulation experiment running on an Android tablet was utilized to record the steps taken by 130 clinicians to reconcile and better understand the clinical information they received about a simulated patient. Evaluating the order in which the clinicians processed the information shows that most clinicians sorted medical condition information before medication history. Clinicians use diverse strategies to arrange the information. This study allows us to expend our understanding of the cognitive task of medication reconciliation, adding to the knowledge that might assist in data presentation in future medical information software. Such an understanding has the potential to provide clinicians with better tools to capture and reconcile clinical information which may ultimately improve patient safety.