Supporting drug prescription through autocompletion

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2013:186:120-4.

Abstract

Computerized prescription is a central component in modern clinical information systems. It allows scheduling drugs delivery, exams and other types of care. It is thought to be a useful tool for the reduction of medication errors and for the improvement of medication logistics. Whereas the success of the computerized prescription depends on the unambiguous selection of the manipulated concepts, there is a strong variability between the preferred terms of clinicians of different backgrounds. Moreover, users sometimes want to use synonyms or don't know the exact spelling of the term. This makes the search for desired procedure name through large size vocabularies time-consuming for users. In order to facilitate the prescriptions process, we have built a tool that proposes the most likely terms based on the first letters inputted by the user. The tool helps selecting the most appropriate term by ranking the possible results in a clever manner. Experimental evaluation shows promising results and indicates the tool ease the terminology manipulations.

MeSH terms

  • Clinical Pharmacy Information Systems*
  • Electronic Prescribing*
  • Medical Order Entry Systems*
  • Medication Errors / prevention & control*
  • Natural Language Processing*
  • Switzerland
  • Terminology as Topic*
  • User-Computer Interface*