Assessment of drug order compliance with therapeutic practice recommendations using OWL2 ontological reasoning

Determining the conformity of a clinician's drug prescription to a given recommended prescription is not obvious since they are expressed at different levels of abstraction and may concern only a subpart of the whole order. Recent formalisms (OWL2) and reasoners from the semantic web are becoming available to handle classification services for defined concepts. The objective is to propose a generic framework based on these technologies to determine the adherence of a drug order to a recommended order with the subsumption relationship. The ATC drug classification is used as a starting point for building a drug ontology. The method has been implemented for arterial hypertention management for which we had a sample of 442 antihypertensive orders. The feasibility of the approach was demonstrated, together with some limitations of the ATC as an ontology which it is not. Additional work and knowledge must be added to correctly handle actual drug orders. © 2011 Lavoisier, Paris.