Building a time-saving and adaptable tool to report adverse drug events

Abstract

The difficult task of detecting adverse drug events (ADEs) and the tedious process of building manual reports of ADE occurrences out of patient profiles result in a majority of adverse reactions not being reported to health regulatory authorities. The SALUS individual case safety report (ICSR) reporting tool, a component currently developed within the SALUS project, aims to support semi-automatic reporting of ADEs to regulatory authorities. In this paper, we present an initial design and current state of of our ICSR reporting tool that features: (i) automatic pre-population of reporting forms through extraction of the patient data contained in an Electronic Health Record (EHR); (ii) generation and electronic submission of the completed ICSRs by the physician to regulatory authorities; and (iii) integration of the reporting process into the physician's work-flow to limit the disturbance. The objective is to increase the rates of ADE reporting and the quality of the reported data. The SALUS interoperability platform supports patient data extraction independently of the EHR data model in use and allows generation of reports using the format expected by regulatory authorities.