PRODUCTS

The clinical decision support within the Multilex Drug Data File (Multilex DDF) checks the medication about to be prescribed or dispensed against information held in the patient's Electronic Health Record and generates a real-time alert message if there are potential clinical problems.

 Having a nationally recognised clinical decision support tool immediately reduces risk from the patient perspective. 
Kate Turner, iSOFT
When it is incorporated into a clinical system and linked with the patient's Electronic Health Record, the clinical decision support within Multilex DDF is able to carry out the following checks:

• Drug-drug interactions - to check if the medication interacts with the patient's current medication. All drug-drug interactions are rated by severity.

•  Drug-food interactions - to check if the medication interacts with foods or drinks such as certain dairy products, fruit juices or salt substitutes.

• Sensitivities - to check if the medication contains the same or related active ingredients to any previous sensitivities recorded on the Electronic Health Record.

• Contraindications and precautions - to check the medication against the patient's age, sex and any recorded medical conditions.

• Drug doubling - to check the medication against the ingredients of a patient's current medication for duplication of ingredients.

• Therapeutic doubling - to check that the medication will not duplicate the exact pharmacological effect of a patient's current medication.

• Dose range check - to check if the dosage is within a safe range for the patient's age and weight.

• Similar names - to indicate when a selected medication has a similar name to another medication, in order to reduce the likelihood of incorrect product selection.

Our clinical decision support ensures that clinicians are aware of the potential hazards of a medication and how these relate to their patient before the medication is prescribed, dispensed or administered, thus helping to reduce the occurrence of medication errors and improve patient safety.

Clinical terminologies
In order to check the drug contraindications against the patient conditions recorded in the Electronic Health Record, First DataBank supports links between the Multilex DDF conditions and Read 2 and Clinical Terms Version 3. 

First DataBank also offers two modules based on SNOMED CT. The SNOMED CT based condition checking module allows SNOMED CT encoded patient data to be used to determine whether a drug is contraindicated for a patient. The sensitivity checking module uses SNOMED CT substance codes to determine whether a patient allergy is in the same allergy group or cross reactor group as a selected medication.