When a 64-year-old woman reported to the emergency department at Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown, N.Y., with right-sided weakness, the medication reconciliation technician (MRT) working with her discovered she’d stopped taking her dabigatran (Pradaxa, Boehringer Ingelheim) 30 days before.
When asked why, the patient said she couldn’t afford the medication and didn’t know the drug helped prevent strokes. So, the technician referred her to the hospital’s patient