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  <front>
    <journal-meta>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="iso-abbrev">Arch Pharm Pract</journal-id>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">archivepp.com</journal-id>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">Arch Pharm Pract</journal-id>
      <journal-title-group>
        <journal-title>Archives of Pharmacy Practice</journal-title>
      </journal-title-group>
      <issn pub-type="epub">2320-5210</issn>
    </journal-meta>
    <article-meta>
      <article-id pub-id-type="publisher-id">archivepp.com-1270</article-id>
      <article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.51847/zrzLpexlrL</article-id>
      <article-categories>
        <subj-group subj-group-type="heading">
          <subject>Original research</subject>
        </subj-group>
      </article-categories>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>When the Medication Record Disagrees with Itself: A Multi-Agent Reconciliation Architecture</article-title>
      </title-group>
                    <contrib-group>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Botha</surname>
                <given-names>Pieter</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff1" ref-type="aff">1</xref>
                                                            <xref rid="cor1" ref-type="corresp" />
                          </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Van Wyk</surname>
                <given-names>Anel</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff1" ref-type="aff">1</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Marais</surname>
                <given-names>Johan</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff2" ref-type="aff">2</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                  </contrib-group>
                  <aff id="aff1">
            <label>1</label>Department of Medication Record Reconciliation and AI, Faculty of Pharmacy, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa.
          </aff>
                  <aff id="aff2">
            <label>2</label>Department of Multi-Agent Systems in Pharmacy, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa.
          </aff>
                          <author-notes>
            <corresp id="cor1">
              <bold>Address for correspondence:</bold> Prof. Wael Abu Dayyih, Department of
              Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy, Mutah University, Al-Karak 61710, Jordan.
                              E-mail: <email xlink:href="pieter.botha@sun.ac.za">pieter.botha@sun.ac.za</email>
                          </corresp>
          </author-notes>
                    <pub-date pub-type="epub">
        <day>30</day>
        <month>03</month>
        <year>2026</year>
      </pub-date>
      <volume>17</volume>
      <issue>1</issue>
      <fpage>22</fpage>
      <lpage>30</lpage>
      <permissions>
        <copyright-statement>
          Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Archives of Pharmacy Practice
        </copyright-statement>
        <copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
        <license>
          <ali:license_ref xmlns:ali="http://www.niso.org/schemas/ali/1.0/"
            specific-use="textmining" content-type="ccbyncsalicense">
            https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/</ali:license_ref>
          <license-p>This is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of
            the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows
            others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate
            credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.</license-p>
        </license>
      </permissions>
      <abstract>
        <title>A<sc>BSTRACT</sc></title>
        <p>Medication reconciliation is commonly represented as the production of one accurate medication list from several incomplete records. This representation obscures a more difficult problem: medication records are source-specific accounts produced for different purposes, at different times, and under different documentation conditions. Prescribing records, dispensing histories, administration records, clinical notes, and patient reports may therefore disagree without any source being uniformly authoritative. This article proposes a multi-agent medication-record reconciliation architecture that treats each record entry as a temporally situated assertion rather than an unquestioned fact. Bounded source-specific agents extract medication assertions while preserving provenance, documentation time, inferred validity intervals, uncertainty, and source limitations. Shared services normalize medication identity, classify disagreement, assess evidence suitability, and construct conflict sets without silently deleting competing assertions. A reconciliation orchestrator generates provisional medication states, while an independent challenge function examines unsupported assumptions and correlated agreement. Conflicts exceeding configured authority or evidentiary sufficiency are transferred to structured human adjudication, external verification, or safety escalation. The proposed architecture distinguishes semantic, temporal, intentional, provenance, omission, and uncertainty disagreements and separates technical reconciliation performance from workflow usefulness, medication safety, equity, and patient outcomes. Validation would require staged component testing, multisite retrospective assessment, silent prospective evaluation, human-factors studies, comparative workflow evaluation, subgroup analysis, clinical-outcome investigation, and postdeployment monitoring. The architecture is an original non-empirical synthesis. It does not establish that multi-agent reconciliation is superior to conventional software or pharmacist-led practice, and it should not be interpreted as a clinically validated, autonomous, or deployment-ready system.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
                <kwd>Digital pharmacy</kwd>
                <kwd>Artificial intelligence</kwd>
                <kwd>Pharmacy practice</kwd>
                <kwd>Medication safety</kwd>
                <kwd>Human–AI collaboration</kwd>
                <kwd>Clinical decision support</kwd>
              </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
</article>