Preventing medicine related emergency department visits in people with renal impairment

Opportunity

Use big data to improve medicine selection and dosing for patients suffering renal impairment.

Project objective

This 2-year project investigates using medicine databases to create an accurate renal dosage decision support tool for primary care. Delivered as a standalone API, this calculator is accessible by different software applications, including prescribing and dispensing software and is transportable across systems.

Inappropriate medicine dosing for renal impaired patients in primary care is part of medication-related problems responsible for 250,000 hospital admissions annually, with an annual cost of $1.4 billion, of which 50% is preventable.

The solution will involve an iterative and collaborative approach to achieve results that accurately reflect current prescription patterns. The results will include an explicit recommendation of opportunities to change the current system and an estimation of cost savings.