An Information Enhanced Framework for Reporting Medication Events

Reporting systems are expected to enhance our understanding of root cause and contributing factors to errors. Lack of feedback and supportive information prohibits reporters benefitting from the purpose and lowers their motivation, which may result in underreporting and low-quality reporting. It is even more challenging to report an insulin-use event with high data quality due to the complex nature of insulin use. In this project, we proposed a framework to discover supportive information from the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), an open data source, to enhance the reporting of insulin-use events. The medications associated with insulin-use events and frequent reactions contained in insulin-use events manifested in FAERS are discovered. The information would be of significance in distinguishing medication names, optimizing adverse event description terms and improving report completeness. The framework represents a paradigm for developing an information enhanced electronic reporting system.