At my organization we have run into issues and are looking into putting a policy in place for how to handle patient own medications that are brought into the hospital that are packaged by companies such as Amazon PillPack. These medications are packaged by date and time and usually include the number of medications, name, and dose.

Overall, we limit the use of patient own medication to specific circumstances where the pharmacy is not able to procure the medication (or until the pharmacy can procure the medication) or if the patient requires a specific brand of medication.

We have run into several issues if we were to consider using medications packaged by these companies:

1. They may not have all of the information we would expect such as expiration date, manufacturer, etc and while we could identify in some cases this can present issues.

2. We only allow usage in cases noted above, so would not use the entire contents of the package. Should the other medications in the package be discarded or should they be placed in prescription bottles with a label? (Back to point 1, that we don't have all of the information to label as we normally would and overall this seems like an unsafe practice.)

3. Controlled substances can be in the packages adding an additional layer for consideration. How are you ensuring that the medications aren't diverted and how are you storing the controlled medications?

If anyone has developed a solution or policy/ procedure, I would appreciate any thoughts, thanks!

Kim

Kimberly Mehta, PharmD, MPH
Kimberly.Mehta@AHN.org