Information systems developments to detect and analyze chemotherapy-associated adverse drug events

A difficult balance exists in the use of cancer chemotherapy in which the cytotoxic medicine must act on the cancer without causing neutropenic fever, a condition that is caused by over-suppression of the immune system. An improved understanding of dosing strategies as well as the use of medications to support the immune system has helped to reduce the likelihood of an admission for neutropenic fever following cancer chemotherapy. Therefore, as with any drug therapy, chemotherapy administration that is temporally associated with an unexpected hospitalization for neutropenia is an adverse drug event (ADE). Analogous to other informatics research to monitor and address the occurrence of ADEs, this work develops and validates the information systems infrastructure necessary to detect the occurrence of and analyze the factors contributing to chemotherapy associated ADEs.