Public release date: 11-Oct-2007
New research from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine has found that nearly 50 percent of patients taking antihypertensive drugs in three community health centers were unable to accurately name a single one of their medications listed in their medical chart. That number climbed to 65 percent for patients with low health literacy.
“It was worse than we expected,” said lead author Stephen Persell, M.D., an assistant professor of medicine, and of the Institute for Healthcare Studies at the Feinberg School, and a physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “It means doctors can’t ask patients to tell them the medications they are taking for their chronic conditions like hypertension. It’s very hard to get at the truth of what medications the patient is actually taking.”
The study will be published in the November issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
Even examining patients’ medical records won’t necessarily tell a doctor what pills a patient is swallowing. Persell said some patients continue to fill old prescriptions even if a doctor has changed the dosages or the medication.
“I’ve seen patients who continued on drugs that I told them to discontinue and stop taking drugs I never told them to stop using,” Persell said.