ABiMed: An intelligent and visual clinical decision support system for medication reviews and polypharmacy management

Polypharmacy can be both a public health and an economic issue. Medication reviews are structured interviews of the patient by the pharmacist, aiming at optimizing the drug treatment and deprescribing potentially inappropriate medications. However, they remain difficult to perform and time-consuming. Several clinical decision support systems were developed for helping clinicians to reduce inappropriate polypharmacy. However, most were limited to the implementation of clinical practice guidelines. In this work, our objective is to design an innovative clinical decision support system for medication reviews and polypharmacy management, named ABiMed.

ABiMed associates several approaches: guidelines implementation, but also the automatic extraction of patient data from the GP's electronic health record and its transfer to the pharmacist, and the visual presentation of contextualized drug knowledge using visual analytics. We performed an ergonomic assessment and qualitative evaluations involving pharmacists and GPs during focus groups and workshops.

We describe the proposed architecture, which allows a collaborative multi-user usage. We present the various screens of ABiMed for entering or verifying patient data, for accessing drug knowledge (posology, adverse effects, interactions), for viewing STOPP/START rules and for suggesting modification to the treatment. Qualitative evaluations showed that health professionals were highly interested in our approach, associating the automatic guidelines execution with the visual presentation of drug knowledge.

The association of guidelines implementation with visual presentation of knowledge is a promising approach for managing polypharmacy. Future works will focus on the improvement and the evaluation of ABiMed.