Avoiding medication conflicts for patients with multimorbidities
Abstract
Clinical pathways are care plans which detail essential steps in the care of patients with a specific clinical problem, usually a chronic disease. A pathway includes recommendations of medications prescribed at different stages of the care plan. For patients with three or more chronic diseases (known asmultimorbidities) the multiple pathways have to be applied together. One common problem for such patients is the adverse interaction between medications given for different diseases. This paper proposes a solution for avoiding medication conflicts for patients with multimorbidities through the use of formal methods. We introduce the notion of a pharmaceutical graph to capture the medications associated to different stages of a pathway. We then explore the use of an optimising SMT solver (Z3) to quickly find the set of medications with the minimal number and severity of conflicts which is assumed to be the safest. We evaluate the approach on a well known case of an elderly patient with five multimorbidities.
Citation
Kovalov , A & Bowles , J K F 2016 , Avoiding medication conflicts for patients with multimorbidities . in E Ábrahám & M Huisman (eds) , Integrated Formal Methods : 12th International Conference, IFM 2016, Reykjavik, Iceland, June 1-3, 2016, Proceedings . Lecture Notes in Computer Science , vol. 9681 , Springer , pp. 376-390 , 12th International Conference on integrated Formal Methods , Reykjavík , Iceland , 1/06/16 . https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33693-0_24 conference
Publication
Integrated Formal Methods
ISSN
0302-9743Type
Conference item
Rights
© 2016, Springer International Publishing Switzerland. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at link.springer.com / https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33693-0_24
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