Do prescribed drugs always follow the patients to hospital?

The reliability was measured with which out-patient medications were identified at the time of a patient's admission to a Dutch hospital. The hospital-pharmacy records and the community-pharmacy records of 205 patients have been reviewed with the help of an expert panel. We established that 15 inadvertent drug discontinuations of a serious nature occurred among 12 patients. While the results are not necessarily representative of the overall Dutch situation, they indicate errors that can be reduced. Improvement is suggested by transmission of computerized data from the community pharmacy to the hospital whenever a patient is admitted and agrees with this transmission.