title: A high-speed drug interaction search system for ease of use in the clinical environment.
abstract: With the advancement of pharmaceutical development, drug interactions have become increasingly complex. As a result, a computer-based drug interaction search system is required to organize the whole of drug interaction data. To overcome problems faced with the existing systems, we developed a drug interaction search system using a hash table, which offers higher processing speeds and easier maintenance operations compared with relational databases (RDB). In order to compare the performance of our system and MySQL RDB in terms of search speed, drug interaction searches were repeated for all 45 possible combinations of two out of a group of 10 drugs for two cases: 5,604 and 56,040 drug interaction data. As the principal result, our system was able to process the search approximately 19 times faster than the system using the MySQL RDB. Our system also has several other merits such as that drug interaction data can be created in comma-separated value (CSV) format, thereby facilitating data maintenance. Although our system uses the well-known method of a hash table, it is expected to resolve problems common to existing systems and to be an effective system that enables the safe management of drugs.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Informatics and Biomedical Engineering, Shiga University of Medical Science, Japan. je3bpv@mac.com
authors.forename: Masahiro
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Takada
authors.forename: Hiroshi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Inada
authors.forename: Kazuo
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Nakazawa
authors.forename: Shoko
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tani
authors.forename: Michiaki
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Iwata
authors.forename: Yoshihisa
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Sugimoto
authors.forename: Satoru
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Nagata
mesh_terms: D003199:Computer Systems; D062313:Databases, Pharmaceutical; D004347:Drug Interactions; D008510:Medication Systems, Hospital; D012984:Software; D013997:Time Factors