An Ontology-based Adverse Drug Event Alert Generation System

Medication errors cause the greatest number adverse drug events than any other single cause. Traumatic Brain Injury and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder patients are especially likely to experience such adverse drug events as a result of the number medications and high dosage levels of the medications that they are prescribed to help them deal with their conditions. Detecting and preventing such adverse drug events is a complex data integration and reasoning problem due to the fact that the individual sources of data that are needed for inferring the potential occurrence of such an event are encoded using disparate medical terminologies and ontologies. SYSNET International, will leverage its extensive experience with clinical data systems integration and with the Military Health System in particular, to develop an ontology-based adverse drug event alert generation system. The system will utilize model-based schema transformation techniques to extract local ontologies from the individual sources of data and then ontology mapping algorithms to align them with a global ontology. A semantic inference engine will be then used to generate potential alerts of adverse drug events.