Guidance on displaying medication side effects in pharmacy workflow

Hi everyone,

We’re working on a feature to display medication side effects to clinicians (in the Order Form) and dispensers (in the Dispense Prescription panel) during the pharmacy workflow.

Before we start building, I wanted to check if anyone has done something similar or knows of existing modules/approaches we could leverage.

What we need:

  1. Display side effects for medications in the patient order form and dispensing details.
  2. Classify side effects as “common” or “severe/unusual.”
  3. A way for admins to manage/update this side effect list (as it will grow/change over time).
  4. A configuration setting to toggle the visibility of these side effects specifically for the dispenser view.

Questions:

  1. Does MRS have any built-in support for drug metadata/attributes like this?
  2. Are there existing modules (or work-in-progress) that handle drug information/side effects?
  3. For the data model, would you recommend extending the Drug entity, using Concept mappings, or creating a dedicated module?

Thanks in advance for any pointers!

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No

Not that I’m aware of, but there may be something out there.

I’d probably think about this as a dedicated module.

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Thanks @ibacher for the feedback. To wrap up the architectural design, I have two more technical questions:

  1. Should we link the side effects to the Drug entity (the specific product) or to the Concept (the active ingredient)? What’s the recommended approach here?
  2. Since we gonna build a new module, does it make sense to map this data to FHIR ClinicalUseDefinition resource? Or is there anything else you would recommend for clinical metadata?

I think that requires the opinion of a pharmacist or practitioner and that it may depend on whatever data source is being used to populate the side-effect information and how it structures data. My guess is that concept-level is ok as long as combined medications are represented via a separate concept, but that’s just a guess.

That would be the right resource to use. It probably makes sense to implement in FHIR, but heavily depends on how you’re intending to query it.

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Thank you for the clarification, it helps a lot.