Rendering Consolidated Medications Record (CMR)
A Consolidated Medications Record (CMR) is defined for the purposes of this guidance as
“a contemporaneous and accurate list of the medicines that an individual is taking in the community, which is assembled from more than one source. The CMR includes adverse drug reactions of which allergies are a subset.”
Regardless of the health care setting, ‘current medication’ is the totality of the medication that has been prescribed for the patient and which it is intended that the patient should now be taking. This also fits with the World Health Organisation’s definition of a ‘Best Possible Medicines History’.
The intent is that whilst the CMR display must first and foremost be human readable, it is underpinned by fully interoperable components. This will then, for example, allow the content of the record to be re-used during admission to hospital without the need to rekey information. The primary objective of a CMR is to improve patient safety, acknowledging that due to the complexity of modern health and care delivery, any care record may not contain all of an individual’s medicines information. Currently this guidance assumes that the CMR is the record of prescribed medication only. The scope does not at present include information on whether medications have been dispensed, administered, or bought over the counter. Nor of course can it cover whether patients have actually taken medication as prescribed. It is possible to provide a clinically useful CMR without every element of the record being structured at the outset. We would therefore advocate starting now with simple rendering and over time building on this incrementally.
This first iteration of professional guidance is for those designing and implementing a Consolidated Medication Record (CMR). The aim is to deliver a set of principles that should be adhered to when system vendors are creating and rendering CMRs to avoid unsafe variations; therefore, this iteration has been co-designed with clinicians and vendors. The aim is for continued collaboration for future iterations.
If you would like this report in an accessible format, please email [email protected] and quote reference FCIPUB:2309-01
