Predicting Adverse Drug Events by Analyzing Electronic Patient Records

Abstract

AbstractDiagnosis codes for adverse drug events (ADEs) are sometimes missing from electronic patient records (EPRs). This may not only affect patient safety in the worst case, but also the number of reported ADEs, resulting in incorrect risk estimates of prescribed drugs. Large databases of electronic patient records (EPRs) are potentially valuable sources of information to support the identification of ADEs. This study investigates the use of machine learning for predicting one specific ADE based on information extracted from EPRs, including age, gender, diagnoses and drugs. Several predictive models are developed and evaluated using different learning algorithms and feature sets. The highest observed AUC is 0.87, obtained by the random forest algorithm. The resulting model can be used for screening EPRs that are not, but possibly should be, assigned a diagnosis code for the ADE under consideration. Preliminary results from using the model are presented.Keywordsmachine learningelectronic patient recordsadverse drug events