On Intelligent Procedures in Medication for Patient Safety: The PSIP Approach

Adverse Drug Events (ADEs) are currently considered as a major public health issue, resulting in endangering patients´ safety and significant healthcare costs. The EU-funded project PSIP (Patient Safety through Intelligent Procedures in Medication) aims to develop intelligent mechanisms towards preventing ADEs, aiming to improve the entire Prescription - Dispensation - Administration - Compliance (PDAC) medication chain. In this regard, PSIP employs data mining and human factor analysis techniques applied on unified patient records and diverse clinical settings respectively, so as to identify the origin of preventable ADEs. This new knowledge combined with existing evidence, in terms of drug interactions and already identified ADE signals reported in the literature, will constitute the basis for constructing contextualized CDSS (Clinical Decision Support System) modules for ADE prevention. In this paper, we briefly present the overall rationale of PSIP and focus on the knowledge engineering approach employed towards the construction of a Knowledge-based System (KBS) regarded as the core part of the PSIP CDSS modules.