Delivering drug interaction information as a web service
The aim of the NPS Pharmaceutical Decision Support (PDS) Program has been to improve the quality of prescribing and use of medicines by health professionals through provision of reliable information during the decision-making process. Delivery of consistent drug interactions information within clinical systems has been identified as an important part of this process.
Drug interaction information from the Australian Medicines Handbook (AMH) is being used as the basis of drug interactions information delivery, provided as a web service. A web service is a software program that is placed on the Internet and can be used by any other program to provide answers to specific questions. The program connecting to the service is called the client. The potential clients of a drug interactions web service are those clinical systems whose users could benefit from drug interaction information provision.
A query to the service (formatted using XML) is a list of a number of drugs and can be sent by any client connected to the Internet. A query response is the drug interaction information (also formatted as XML) relevant to the query.
The query response can be processed electronically to provide the user with information on a number of levels, such as:
· The number of interactions returned (and whether they are drug class or drug interactions)
· The distinct drug pairings within the list of drugs sent that have an interaction recorded
· A succinct description of each of the interactions
· Contextual information around the interactions.
The client systems receiving the response can process it in any way that is useful within the context of its user interface. For example, the user may request that interaction queries are sent automatically and that a panel showing the number of interactions is updated. Further detail on the interactions would then be available on user request.
This service is the first example of web service provision of QUM by NPS. Its evaluation will guide the development of further services.