Healthcare app to reduce harm from drug combinations

Abstract

Improvements in healthcare, including better drugs, mean that we live 25 years longer than we did sixty years ago. Ironically, incorrect drug combinations lead to more than 300,000 deaths annually in the EU and the US. Can technology mitigate this peril? Over half of people who medicate daily take at least four different drugs. The phenomenon is called polypharmacy, and it increases adverse drug reactions exponentially. To prevent fatalities, healthcare professionals need to be aware of harmful interactions. Portals like DrugBank and Drugs.com already provide detailed information about known drug-drug interactions, but they lack the latest knowledge. Under Dr Charlie Abela’s supervision, I created a platform that uses biomedical literature to help healthcare professionals identify harmful interactions between two drugs. Our system is called medicX and consists of two main components. The first is responsible for the automatic identification of drugs from biomedical texts. The second checks whether a sentence is explaining an interaction between the identified drugs.