Adverse Drug Event Prevention in Neonatal Care: A Rule-Based Approach

K. Lazou, M. Farini, V. Koutkias, V. Drossou, N. Maglaveras, N. Bassiliades, “Adverse Drug Event Prevention in Neonatal Care: A Rule-Based Approach”, European Federation of Medical Informatics special topic conference on Data and Knowledge for Medical Decision Support (EFMI STC 2013), Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, Prague 2013.

Adverse drug events (ADE) in a neonatal unit can be of great importance due to the underlying nature and the special characteristics of the patients. This paper presents our work on the development of a knowledge base (KB) for supporting the identification and prevention of ADEs. First, a literature review was conducted to identify ADEs observed through the use of the most commonly-used drugs in a specific neonatal unit. Then, the acquired knowledge was encoded according to an ontological data model developed for the representation of the specific facts for the neonatal unit. Finally, a rule-based prototype consisting of 164 rules was implemented in order to represent and simulate the inference procedure about preventing ADEs.