Contextualized potential drug-drug interaction clinical decision support

New information regarding potential drug-drug interactions (PDDIs) is published every day in primary sources such as drug product labeling and the scientific literature. A PubMed search for publications indexed with the Medical Subject Headings keyword “Drug interactions” shows an average of 3,970 publications per year from 2000 through 2016. This suggests that the body of evidence about PDDIs is overwhelming and dynamic. Food and drug regulatory agencies in the United States, European Union, and Japan have issued guidance to industry recommending the use of drug product labeling to communicate potential involvements in drug interactions (Reki? et al. 2017). As it is impossible for clinicians to keep up with the PDDI evidence base, drug experts generate summaries of PDDI evidence from primary sources. These summaries bring PDDI knowledge to clinicians in the form of published drug information compendia, clinical decision support rules, and interaction checking applications. However, there are currently no broadly accepted standards to guide these experts in the knowledge representation and services implementation of PDDI information that would be most effective for clinical decision support. Without international coordination for the extensions and profiles used to express PDDI CDS, needless variation is certain to occur in implementations. This project will provide the opportunity for the international community to collaborate and come to consensus on patterns used in implementations.