Teaching pharmacy students a systematic approach to medication order verification

Background and purpose: Inpatient medication order verification is an important skill for pharmacy students to learn for patient safety. This article describes a systematic approach to order verification that enables students to apply didactic knowledge and determine the presence of drug therapy problems during verification decisions.

Educational activity and setting: At two different colleges of pharmacy, an order verification module for second-year pharmacy students introduced a checklist for reviewing medication orders in a patient chart and identifying the presence of drug therapy problems. Students had to make a "verify or not" decision for each non-verified order and document their decision in both the chart and on a game-based learning platform.

Findings: Over four academic years, 756 students participated in the module. With the checklist approach to order verification, students were able to identify the drug therapy problems of "dose too high" and "no drug therapy problem present" but were challenged by "wrong drug," "dose too low/renal dosing," and "duplication of therapy."

Summary: The order verification checklist was a beneficial tool for teaching a systematic approach to inpatient medication order verification.