Taking ones medicine correctly remains an enormous challenge in much of the western world. Often when the issue of medication is discussed, it’s done so through the lens of ensuring patients take their medication in the right doses at the right time.
Indeed, I wrote only recently about a study highlighting the value of text messaging to help patients to do just that.
Of course, the issues surrounding correct medication don’t just occur on the patients side, but also in the prescribing side of the fence too.
It’s estimated that around one million injuries occur each year in America alone as a result of poor prescribing of medication, with many of these a result of an overwhelming level of stress and time pressure on the medical staff involved.
A new platform has emerged to try and help improve matters. The platform, called Medaware, uses a big data style analytics backend to highlight any errors that may be occurring in the prescription process, thus allowing health professionals to correct the mistakes before they have more serious implications for the patient.
There are often decision support systems in place to do this kind of thing already, but as many are based on simple heuristics, they don’t do a great job of catching many errors.
The makers of Medaware believe their big data based approach allows them to use a much broader net to catch mistakes, which hopefully gives it greater potency.
The system works by evaluating the drug as its prescribed to the patient. If the medication deviates from the normal drugs prescribed to patients with similar symptoms it raises an immediate flag, and notifies the doctor accordingly.
These alerts can be over-ridden by the medical staff if they regard what they’re doing as safe. A neat feature is that there is a 10 percent false alarm rate built into the system to try and reduce the possibility of alarm fatigue in staff.
With 1 in 20 prescriptions given on the NHS containing an error of some kind, with a particular risk as the number of medications increased, any system that can better help professionals deliver the correct medication has to be encouraged.
You can find out more about Medaware in the promo video below.
That's a cool sounding project. I had no idea that mistakes were quite as common as that, but I suppose it's inevitable. Anything that can help to prevent them has to be a good thing.
It is a very hot topic now a days. There are lots of advantages of big data but here some disadvantages creates problem and we can not ignore them. It may affect the privacy of a person, the major disadvantage.