Supporting Multi-sourced Medication Information in i2b2

Postmarketing drug surveillance is critical to assessing adverse events associated with medications, because prelaunch clinical trials frequently miss negative drug effects. The Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside platform (i2b2) has been used effectively for this. However, previous work suffers from incomplete medical data present in electronic health record (EHR) systems. Here, we develop a system to integrate non-traditional data sources with EHR data: pharmacy dispensing information and patient-reported data. We implement and validate a toolset to gather medication data from a Pharmacy Benefit Manager network, import it into an i2b2 EHR repository using a standard data format, merge it with the EHR data, and present it to for annotation with results returned to i2b2. This toolkit is enabling studies on medication list data quality, adherence, and adverse event detection.