A Knowledge-Based Platform for Assessing Potential Adverse Drug Reactions at the Point of Care: User Requirements and Design.

Abstract

Even though Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) constitute a significant public health issue, there is a lack of Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) tools supporting Pharmacovigilance activities at the point of care. In this paper, we present the rationale of a Web-based platform to address this need. The driving user scenario of the proposed platform refers to a clinician who investigates information for a possible ADR as part of a specific patient treatment. The goal is to facilitate this assessment through appropriate tools for searching various relevant data sources, analysing the acquired data, aggregating the obtained evidence, and offering follow-up ADR monitoring over time in a systematic and user-friendly way. In this regard, we describe the adopted user requirements engineering methodology and illustrate the use of Knowledge Engineering (KE) as the platform's main technical paradigm to enable heterogeneous data integration and handle the complexity of the underlying information processing workflow.