The patient is an elderly woman, recently treated at the hospital for gastrointestinal bleeding, and with a history of heart disease and stroke. She's brought her doctor a bag of 15 medications that she's taking, plus a discharge medication list from the hospital.

The two don't match up. 

That's the hypothetical problem students from KU School of Medicine-Wichita and KU School of Pharmacy have to figure out during a medication reconciliation workshop put together by Dr. Melissa Gaines.

The goal is to come up with orders and prescriptions that establish what medication the patient should be taking. And that's not as easy as you might think.

Gaines said medication reconciliation is one of the biggest concerns in the medical field right now, with studies showing that the wrong kind or amount of medication "is the number one cause of adverse effects after discharge."

This workshop -- attended by both medical and pharmacy students, termed interprofessional training  -- represents another current trend in the medical field. The joint training leads to better coordination of care among medical professionals, and more closely represents the type of teamwork that most medical professionals experience in actual practice.

Gaines designed the hypothetical test. "The patient is actually taking a quadruple dose of fish oil, which can predispose bleeding," she said. "And she has a common phenomenon called prescribing cascade, which is where a side effect from one medication is not attributed to it, and another medication is prescribed for the side effect. So the patient ends up on two meds for basically the same problem."

"I know it sounds confusing," Gaines said. "Because it is."

The workshop is being offered to third-year medical students as well as students in the KU School of Pharmacy. Working in groups, the students come up with changes or concerns they present to the other participants.

"By the time we go around the room, we've actually completed the case," Gaines said.

Gaines teaches geriatric medicine at KU in addition to practicing at Wesley Medical Center and the KU Adult Medicine Clinic. She developed the medication reconciliation workshop after attending a faculty development session at the Reynolds Center on Aging in Kansas City. It is the first of its kind for the Wichita campus.

Student feedback on the 90-minute workshop has been positive, she said. "There is a recurring comment that the students want more time. That makes me think this is valuable."