title: Automatic detection of omissions in medication lists.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Evidence suggests that the medication lists of patients are often incomplete and could negatively affect patient outcomes. In this article, the authors propose the application of collaborative filtering methods to the medication reconciliation task. Given a current medication list for a patient, the authors employ collaborative filtering approaches to predict drugs the patient could be taking but are missing from their observed list.
  
  
  METHODS
  The collaborative filtering approach presented in this paper emerges from the insight that an omission in a medication list is analogous to an item a consumer might purchase from a product list. Online retailers use collaborative filtering to recommend relevant products using retrospective purchase data. In this article, the authors argue that patient information in electronic medical records, combined with artificial intelligence methods, can enhance medication reconciliation. The authors formulate the detection of omissions in medication lists as a collaborative filtering problem. Detection of omissions is accomplished using several machine-learning approaches. The effectiveness of these approaches is evaluated using medication data from three long-term care centers. The authors also propose several decision-theoretic extensions to the methodology for incorporating medical knowledge into recommendations.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Results show that collaborative filtering identifies the missing drug in the top-10 list about 40-50% of the time and the therapeutic class of the missing drug 50%-65% of the time at the three clinics in this study.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Results suggest that collaborative filtering can be a valuable tool for reconciling medication lists, complementing currently recommended process-driven approaches. However, a one-size-fits-all approach is not optimal, and consideration should be given to context (eg, types of patients and drug regimens) and consequence (eg, the impact of omission on outcomes).
authors: Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA. hasan_sharique@gsb.stanford.edu
authors: Sharique
authors: S
authors: Hasan
authors: George T
authors: GT
authors: Duncan
authors: Daniel B
authors: DB
authors: Neill
authors: Rema
authors: R
authors: Padman
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004360:Drug Therapy, Computer-Assisted; D057286:Electronic Health Records; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D016015:Logistic Models; D059065:Medication Reconciliation; D008509:Medication Systems; D025341:Principal Component Analysis