Drug Prescription Software Design to Reduce Medical Errors

Summary

A US healthcare software startup needed a solution to detect contradictions between prescribed medications and patients' conditions, reducing medical errors caused by inappropriate treatment. INNERLUXES's business analysts produced a detailed requirements specification and a concept for two complementary applications — a mobile patient app and an EMR-integrated desktop app for physicians — both checking medication labeling for contraindications and surfacing red or yellow alerts to support safer prescribing, especially for chronic conditions.

About the Client

The Client is an aspiring US startup providing healthcare organizations and patients with mobile and desktop solutions for care coordination, health information exchange (HIE), and patient engagement.

The Challenge

The Client needed a solution to detect contradictions between prescribed medications and patients' conditions in order to reduce medical errors caused by inappropriate treatment. At the first stage of the project, the Client turned to INNERLUXES to create a detailed requirements specification.

The Solution

The mission behind the app is to determine whether a prescribed medicine contradicts a patient's current health status and could possibly harm them. This is especially important for accurate chronic condition management.

To support both patients and their physicians, our team of business analysts came up with two versions of the solution: a mobile patient app and an EMR-integrated desktop application for doctors. While both perform the same task — checking whether the wording on the medication label contains contraindications to the patient's diseases and conditions — they interact with the end user (patient or physician) differently.

Mobile patient app

To offer patients access to information on all available medications, the app uploads data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine (DailyMed). To keep medication content and labeling found on medication package inserts up to date, the app synchronizes with the DailyMed database monthly.

The app would allow a patient to:

• Add conditions / diseases by tapping the Conditions button and choosing an appropriate title from the list via search prompts enabled after typing at least 2 characters.
• Add medications prescribed by a physician via the Medications button, also choosing a medication from the list via search prompts enabled after typing at least 4 characters.
• View the medication package inserts if needed.
• Automatically compare a condition title to the prescribed medication and find out if there are any contraindications by tapping the Check button.

The app can find the condition title within medication package inserts in one or several of the following sections:

• Boxed warning section
• Warning(s)
• Precautions
• Warnings and precautions
• Contraindication(s)
• General precautions

In this case, a patient will see either a yellow or red alert. A red alert appears when a condition title exactly matches the term in the contraindications part of the medication package inserts — for example, when dementia-related psychosis is both a patient's diagnosis and a contraindication of their medication. If a patient's condition title closely but not exactly matches a contraindication, it triggers a yellow alert — for example, when the inserts list psychosis among contraindications while the condition title is entered as dementia-related psychosis.

Desktop version

An EMR-integrated desktop application supports physicians' decision-making by working in the background and only alerting about dangerous contradictions between a patient's conditions and prescribed medications.

When a doctor sees a patient and wants to prescribe a certain medicine, they simply type the name of the medication into the patient's record in their EMR system.

The application automatically compares the patient's current diseases and conditions with the six sections in the medication package inserts to reveal any contraindications. If there are none, the physician gets no notifications; but if the inserts contain terms that are exact or close matches to the condition titles, a red or yellow alert appears accordingly. Upon receiving these warnings, the physician can decide whether to prescribe another medication for that particular patient.

The Results

• The concept created by INNERLUXES's business analysts allows the Client to provide both patients and physicians with tools to identify inappropriate treatment in time and discuss more relevant choices before any medical error occurs.
• The solutions aim to improve care coordination and safeguard patients' health, especially for patients with multiple and/or chronic conditions.
• Following the concept, the team moved on to defining the architecture and technology stack to begin implementation of the mobile app.