STRIPA: An effective and efficient rule-based decision support system for medication reviews in primary care

2^nd International Conference on Health Informatics and Technology

July 27-29, 2015 Valencia, Spain

Marco Spruit

Posters-Accepted Abstracts: J Health Med Informat

Abstract :

The chronic use of multiple medicinal drugs is growing, partly because individual patientsâ?? drugs have not been adequately prescribed by primary care physicians. In order to reduce these polypharmacy problems, the Systematic Tool to Reduce Inappropriate Prescribing (STRIP) has been created. To facilitate physiciansâ?? use of the STRIP method, the STRIP assistant (STRIPA) has been developed. STRIPA is a stand-alone web-based decision support system that advices physicians during the pharmaco-therapeutic analysis of patientsâ?? health records. In this talk the applicationâ??s architecture and rule engine and the design decisions relating to the user interface and semantic interoperability are described and demonstrated. First, an experimental validation of the prototype by general practitioners and pharmacists has shown that users perform significantly better when optimizing medication with STRIPA than without. Second, our longitudinal study results indicate that the systemâ??s efficiency improves over time. Concluding, we argue that a process-oriented decision support system such as STRIPA, built around a context-aware rule engine and operated through an intuitive user interface, is in fact able to contribute to improving drug prescriptions in daily practice.