Project

In medicine, there is the underlying principle to apply treatment for the patient’s benefit without risking harm. This is often referred to as the “do no harm” oath. However, in patients with multiple health conditions multiple medications are often prescribed. While done with good intention to treat the individual conditions, it can increase the likelihood of experiencing adverse drug events due to a harmful interaction between two or more medications. Despite the knowledge that the risk of an adverse drug event increases with the number of medications, our understanding of which drug combinations are harmful is limited. Thus, the driving motivation of MedCare is to overcome this limitation by developing screen algorithms that can applied to two different types of healthcare data – adverse event reporting data (i.e., pharmacovigilance) and routinely collected healthcare data (i.e., timeseries data) – to detect and validate adverse drug events associated with harmful drug combinations.