BWH and MGH MedicationsMedications are derived from TSI, the Longitudinal Medical Record (LMR), and OnCall systems. Medications from TSI are associated with hospital encounters only. These comprise mainly inpatient status patients, but also include emergency department, surgical day care (SDC), or observation status patients. Hospital-based patient medications for BWH include inpatients, emergency room, observation stays, and newborns. For MGH, medications include inpatients, dialysis, observation stays, surgical day care, newborns and some research patients. Medications from the LMR are associated with outpatient encounters, while the codes are defined locally. A number of analytic processes are performed to make the data as consistent and reliable as possible. If a provider describes a medication in several different ways, such as, for example, aspirin, the analytic processes applied attempt to collapse all of the synonyms under one consistent code and description. If the LMR code for this common medication is 3644, but it is described as Aspirin 79% of the time, as ASA 19% of the time, and as Bayer 3% of the time, these are reviewed manually, determined to be synonymous, and altered to a single description—Aspirin. Medications from the OnCall system are associated with outpatient encounters within MGH. The codes are in the COSTAR coding system.
|