Delivering actionable drug information to healthcare providers at their fingertips

The Challenge

• Extract data on adverse drug effects (ADE) and safety warnings from millions of articles on public databases such as FDA medical reviews, biomedical literature, and pub/med journals.
• Devise a method to retrieve information from old medical reviews that are available only as scanned copies of paper-based documents.
• Provide a simple, user-friendly interface for clinicians and patients to search drug information whenever needed, even if it’s during consultations or hospital rounds.
• Create data extraction rules to determine the source of drug information and sift through thousands of drugs to respond to a search query.
• Ensure the safety of sensitive medical information and adhere to healthcare industry regulations.

The Solution

• BTC analyzed the client requirements extensively and developed an innovative solution that collects data on drug effects and provides a summary of drugs through a simple text-based search.
• Curated a list of FDA-approved drugs that need to be included and manually extracted relevant information from public databases. The drug-related information was then classified into three levels based on evidence of adverse drug effects available.
• Implemented OCR process to recognize text from scanned documents and integrated ABBYY application to provide high-quality conversion of PDF files to a readable format.
• The solution enabled the users to search for drug adverse effects information by simply entering drug names, symptoms, or diagnoses.
• We also facilitated search queries using free text format, where users could provide an entire term or just the first few letters. Our intelligent solution integrated with MedDRA (Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities) ensured that the text entered by the user was autocoded to MedDRA terms and matched with the exact phrase to display results.
• The search output of the application includes a summary of drug effects and a list of results with appropriate ranking based on evidence.
• The solution also provided numerous graphical illustrations to represent information, including drug effects, level of evidence, and percentage of problems associated with each drug, further elevating the user experience.
• We held effective discussions with our client’s internal team to formulate Data Extractions rules. The algorithm continuously checks for newly approved drugs and adds related information to the data tables at regular intervals.
• Adhered to industry standards, including HIPAA, to prevent undue exposure of sensitive information.

Devices:

iOS
Android

Technology:

Java
Javascript
jQuery
MySQL
MedDRA
API integration
Web and mobile applications

The Outcome

BTC delivered a HIPAA-compliant and intelligent solution that provided drug effects information to healthcare providers and patients at their fingertips. The platform offered actionable information to clinicians, enabling better diagnostic evaluations and patient care. The simple search query feature and graphical representation of information made it easier for users to visually understand the data, improving their experience.