Sunday, July 31, 2011

Prescribing decision support

So what's the point of representing knowledge in the first place? Well to help make decisions, of course!

One of the low-hanging fruit is drug prescribing decision support. This 2008 systematic review found, surprisingly, there is not a lot of evidence to support it, but nevertheless the review does provides a useful check list of prescribing decision support dimensions:
  • Drug-allergy
  • Dosing
  • Formulary decision
  • Duplicate therapy
  • Drug–drug interaction
  • Dosing support for renal insufficiency and geriatric patients
  • Guidance for medication-related laboratory testing
  • Drug-disease contraindication

2 comments:

  1. DSS needs to be made available close or at the clinician-patient point of care. Ideally they will be more than a eBook! This is possible with the use of available standards. Metadata for DSS artefacts are up for discussion in the virtual medical record working group of HL7.

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  2. Great - I've been looking for the current HL7 standards - but it mostly seems to be happening behind closed doors. Do you have any links or docs to share?

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