iMedication – a Rule-based Expert Network for Intelligent Medication
Safe medication is a growing concern in the health sector. Doctors are no longer able to keep abreast of the steadily growing amount of drugs and their potential for unintended interactions and adverse drug events (ADE).
Starting with the prescription situation, iMedication will set up a comprehensive knowledge–based ADE reporting process which aims to
- identify as early as possible suspected adverse drug events (ADEs),
- support plausibility checks about an ADE suspicion and
- report verified ADEs in a sufficiently detailed and standardised way.
The reported ADEs will be collected in a knowledge base using the Arden notation. Arden rules will then specify drug risk patterns which can be used by doctors as additional checks for the drug prescription. On a scientific-technological level iMedication will semantically integrate distributed knowledge about drugs and ADEs in order to support the prescription task. Expert rules will be used in order to support the decision making process for selecting the appropriate drug. A rule engine stores the medication rules, the rules for the drug risk patterns and possible recommendations. iMedication uses Arden syntax for specifying the rules, which is an artificial-intelligence-based formal knowledge representation language for specifying and processing statements about medical conditions and for specifying decision rules, e,g, for recommendations.
iMedication aims at increasing patient safety through the linking of distributed knowledge repositories, through supporting the early identification of adverse drug events and through integrating the operative knowledge of local as well as remote, experts.
