Development and evaluation of advanced clinical decision support systems: a pharmacoepidemiological approach (FWOSB82)

In March 2017, the WHO launched its third Global Patient Safety Challenge focusing on the reduction of patient harm by medication errors including drug-drug interactions (DDIs) and contraindicated administrations. Medication errors are the major cause of preventable adverse drug events which cause 4-6% of hospitalizations and occur in 10% of hospitalized patients leading to prolonged hospital stays. At least 15% of hospital expenditures can be attributed to patient harm. A leading approach to improve patient safety is the use of clinical decision support systems (CDSS) which are computer systems that assist clinicians in decision making at the point in time that these decisions are made by for example providing alerts at the moment of prescribing. However, current CDSS are still relatively simple, i.e. they do not take into account the individual context of a patient, which results in non-specific alerts and alert fatigue. Physicians become desensitized to the excessive number of safety alerts they receive, leading to cancelling or overriding all alerts. A context-specific CDSS alerting system displays only the
relevant alerts which makes it more useful. This project’s first focus is to develop and implement such a context-specific CDSS for complex but frequent DDIs leading to heart rhythm disorders. Secondly, we
will develop a context-specific CDSS for drug allergy screening by taking into account patient- and drug-related factors in the risk severity assessment.

Keywords:clinical pharmacy, information system

Disciplines:Cardiology, Clinical pharmacy