Data visualization speeds review of potential adverse drug events in patients on multiple medications

Patients on multiple medications are at increased risk for adverse drug events. While physicians can reduce this risk by regularly reviewing the side-effect profiles of their patients' medications, this process can be time-consuming. We created a decision support system designed to expedite reviewing potential adverse reactions through information visualization. The system includes a database containing 16,340 unique drug and side-effect pairs, representing 250 common medications. A numeric score is assigned to each pair reflecting the strength of association between drug and effect. Based on these scores, the system generates graphical adverse reaction maps for any user-selected combination of drugs. A study comparing speed and accuracy of retrieving side-effect data using this tool versus UpToDate (R) demonstrated a 60% reduction in time to complete a query (61 s vs. 155 s, p <0.0001) with no decrease in accuracy. These findings suggest that information visualization can significantly expedite review of potential adverse drug events. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.