Investigating Polypharmacy for Patients with Multi Encounters Using the QL4POMR Framework

Abstract

Comorbidity is the presence of two or more clinical conditions encountering a patient at the time of visit, hospitalization or being with the patient for a considerable time. Most of these conditions are chronic conditions. Treatment of comorbidity and patients with comorbid diseases poses a major health issue for millions of people worldwide and requires collaboration between clinical providers as well as the use of knowledge cross domains of practice. Having multiple diseases inevitably lead to the use of multiple drugs, a condition known as polypharmacy. This article investigates internists might how to tackle polypharmacy using our previously developed QL4POMR which is kind of medical translation system. QL4POMR provide clinicians with SOAP to describe the patient case at the bedside and link it to the biomedical repositories like the OpenTargets and DrugBank. Based on this link clinician can identify issues associated with polypharmacy like disease to drug interactions or drug to drug interactions. Polypharmacy for comorbid conditions like asthma and hypertension has been investigated as proof of concept.