A Decision Support System for Therapy Prescription in a Hospital Centre

Several cases are reported every year where the prescribed therapy results incompatible with the patient’s medical history, leading to worsening of clinical condition or death. Some technologies and processes to prevent this misbehaviour already exist, but a concrete solution is not available in hospitals yet. This paper presents a Decision Support System (DSS) that can be easily integrated into a typical health workflow at hospitals and provides feedback on the possible prescription of drugs at a patient with specific diseases. The DSS is based on a Big Data analysis algorithm able to check drugs and diseases relationships and detect possible failures in drugs prescriptions. We developed a prototype of the proposed solution, implementing the DSS system and setting up the necessary Big Data management tools for the effective adoption of the DSS system. We performed some evaluations to assess the efficacy and the response time of the DSS algorithm.