Development of a Computer Aided Information System to Provide Information of Adverse Effects to the Patient

Abstract

When a pharmacist informs a patient of premonitory symptoms to prevent any adverse effects of each prescribed medicine, such instructions are often to complicated to be understood by the patients, mainly due to the fact that numerous medicines have a wide range of adverse effects, and furthermore, an such adverse effects have many premonitory symptoms. We attempted to make a computer aided adverse effect informing program to assist pharmacists. This program arranges the symptoms according to their order of importance, and gives the probable information of adverse effect, which is not mentioned in the package leaflet. The most frequent and common premonitory symptoms of adverse effect were suggested to be fever and fatigue as a result of running the program when many individual patient prescription data were inputted.
The incorporation of this program into the computer system that manages the patient's medicine history will be useful for pharmacists to inform patients of understandable premonitory symptoms and to monitor any potential adverse effect.