Harnessing Ontologies to Improve Prescription in Pediatric Medicine

There are many drug databases, but sometimes the data quality may result in wrong medication for patients. Results that it is very important to provide a good quality drug information, supply structured information and build useful relations between the drugs related information and the patient status in terms of particularities. Children are the most sensitive to drug dosage or certain substances that is why pediatrics was our first choice for the research. To support this, we propose an ontology starting from on-line drug prospectuses. We start extracting the prospectuses information from the web pages, investigate the sections of the prospectuses structure (indications, contraindications, dosage, etc.) and use the information in an ontology that we integrate into a pediatric application. In the background of the application this solution provides the correct matching between the patient and the treatment, extracting for the physician only the best prescription options for the current case. The application allows the physician to select the appropriate drug and decide the best treatment in terms of correct substances and dosage for a certain child. We use the prospectuses solution because the application is in Romanian and other resources are not very well provided. For the future the solution will be adapted to other languages and other databases. This model can be generalized in different languages. The application is improved with the new ontology module and helps physicians to give a good treatment considering all relationships, constraints or antagonistic situations that may occur in providing a treatment.