Developing a desktop application for drug-drug interaction checker ordered for chronic diseases in Ethiopian hospitals pharmacy

Abstract

Drug-drug interactions are a major cause of morbidity worldwide and are a leading source of treat ment inefcacy. They are classifed based on their pharmacological action on the body as major, moderate, and minor. Currently, it is a tedious process to remember the drug-drug interactions by the pharmacist during dispensing of the prescribed drugs for the patients. Therefore, there is a need for technology that assists the pharmacist in checking the drug-drug interaction for prescribed drugs. Therefore, in this work, a desktop-based application that can automatically identify the drug-drug interactions for prescribed drugs that could operate ofine for those found in low-resource setting hospitals has been developed. To do this, around 3000 drugs along with their major and moderate interaction points were collected from Ethiopian Pharmaceutical Supply Agency. The developed system included two main parts; the database part that comprises all the drugs collected along with their major and moderate interaction points, and a patient registration platform to register the patients’ history. The system was developed by using C sharp program ing language