Identifying / displaying medications based on Therapeutic Drug Class in EMR/EHR

Hi Ray
I don't disagree about searching; that's a different issue. I was referencing display (and communication) requirements. And the point I wanted to highlight was about the evidence that I could find (or indeed not find) by the normal recognised processes for evidence gathering. I wanted (actually needed) to be able to robustly justify the requirements that I fed into the model for the Medication Profile that I developed.

When I was able to get my ideas through to EMR vendors one of the things that I was able to get implemented was to be able to search for a medication by drug class. This was extremely useful particularly when you could not remember the name of the drug but you knew the class that it was in. There is a rule of thumb in user interface design that "recognition is better than recall". Whoever said that there is no need for looking things up by drug class probably had a very good memory, like most physicians think they have. I recall an old study that showed that the year of graduation from medical school could be predicted from the medications that were prescribed.

Ray

Hi.
I did a review of this type of requirement as part of my thesis for designing a Medication Profile. In the evidence that gathered, there were no direct requirements from patient care for displaying medications based on Therapeutic Drug Class; there were some indirect requirements coming from the decision support scenarios, but these almost always required additional input from a knowledgebase. However, and in stark contrast, the requirements coming the research side were most definitely for medications described using Therapeutic Drug Class - indeed it was rare to find evidence of medications being named directly in the research use cases.
I would be interested to know what prompted the suggestion for this, because in a fairly robust and recent search for evidence for explicitly this topic, I found none for patient care use cases.

Hello,
NLCHI is looking for information on identifying/displaying medications based on "Therapeutic Drug Class" in EMR/EHR.

Currently, our clinical portal (HEALTHeNL) gives our health care professionals access to patient medication profile. We are working on a new requirement: "Identify/display medications based on Therapeutic Drug Class" (e.g. Opioids, Anticoagulants, Antihypertensive, etc.). This is relevant for the medication profile in our clinical portal (HEALTHeNL) as it relates to the prescriber requirements for review under the Prescription Monitoring Program (PMP).

Could we ask our jurisdictional colleagues to share information or people we could contact to find out if other jurisdictions are identifying/displaying medications based on the Therapeutic Drug Class?

Thanks,
Sisira (NLCHI).