SmartPrescription: A principled approach towards eliminating prescription errors in healthcare

Abstract

While it might deceptively appear that the major issues in medication concern medicine prescription calculations and the subtleness of conversions between measuring units, research in healthcare shows that the key issues relate to the context in which medication is prescribed. For instance, calculation of dose for the elderly is particularly sensitive especially in cases of repeat prescriptions whereby monitoring is crucial to avoid misuse. Initial (UK-based) primary research among four primary care surgeries and interviews with paediatricians indicated the lack of custom functions within existing information systems in a way that exploits knowledge about drugs, past prescriptions and patients' medical history. This paper presents the research we carried out towards addressing these issues. In particular, the paper presents a prototype software system developed that illustrates the efficacy of addressing medicine calculation issues where contextual information about drug, illness, and patient history are used to reliably inform the prescription process.