Abstract
Prescribing the right drugs for a patient is a difficult task that takes into consideration several factors. The Institute of Medicine (IOM), U.S.A., has reported based on two major studies (1999–2001 & 2006) that prescribing the wrong medication is a big problem, and the effects can sometimes be fatal. To address this problem, we designed and implemented, a distributed intelligent mobile agent-based system by the name, OptiPres. This system will be used by doctors on their smart phones while prescribing medicines. It will assist them in making more informed decisions by either choosing the optimal solution from processing a repository of past decisions or by presenting a set of possible drugs and using criteria specified by them to identify the optimal drug. The evaluation of OptiPres was done by comparing its recommended outcome of three predefined medical scenarios against the recommendations from a group of doctors and the World Health Organization (WHO) manual entitled:‘Guide to Good Prescribing’. The results indicate that OptiPres is effective in prescribing optimal drugs and in reducing the cognitive burden on doctors, especially in subjective decision making contexts where they have to consider multiple parameters.
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Notes
FIPA is an IEEE Computer Society standards organization that promotes agent-based technology and the interoperability of its standards with other technologies.
This experiment is where the results from the tests are concealed from the subjects until after the tests, to reduce bias.
Familiar drugs that are prescribed regularly by a doctor.
The filters are: Mechanism of Action, Pharmacokinetics,Physiologic Effect and Therapeutic Category.
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Miller, K., Mansingh, G. OptiPres: a distributed mobile agent decision support system for optimal patient drug prescription. Inf Syst Front 19, 129–148 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-015-9595-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-015-9595-9