SMARTSync: Towards patient-driven medication reconciliation

Abstract

Interactions between prescription medications, over-the-counter drugs, and nutritional supplements can have negative consequences for patients. There is a need for the reconciliation across this spectrum spurred on by the adoption of electronic medical records by healthcare providers and the usage of personal health records by patients. In such a setting, unifying information from multiple sources through automated reconciliation can address adverse medication interactions, track adverse medication reactions, and avoid overmedication. This requires mitigating the integration issues of multiple data sources and systems. In this paper, we leverage Harvard University's SMART framework to perform medication reconciliation across different data sources, with the long-term goal of providing robust decision support for overmedication and adverse interactions. Our prototype application SMARTSync provides ontology-backed recognition of interactions, decision support, and is able to warn a patient (or notify a provider) of potential medication problems.