Guidance on displaying medication side effects in pharmacy workflow

[olewandowski (Oliver Lewandowski)]

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!

[ibacher (Ian Bacher)]

@olewandowski

Does MRS have any built-in support for drug metadata/attributes like this?

No

@olewandowski

Are there existing modules (or work-in-progress) that handle drug information/side effects?

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

@olewandowski

For the data model, would you recommend extending the Drug entity, using Concept mappings, or creating a dedicated module?

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

[olewandowski (Oliver Lewandowski)]

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?

[ibacher (Ian Bacher)]

@olewandowski

What’s the recommended approach here?

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.

@olewandowski

Since we gonna build a new module, does it make sense to map this data to FHIR ClinicalUseDefinition resource?

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.

[olewandowski (Oliver Lewandowski)]

Thank you for the clarification, it helps a lot.

[pwargulak (Piotr Wargulak)]

@olewandowski Any findings that we could share with the community on this topic?

[olewandowski (Oliver Lewandowski)]

Nothing to share yet at this stage. I’m currently working on the HLD for the feature, and once that is ready, we’d definitely welcome community input.

[olewandowski (Oliver Lewandowski)]

There is one thing worth mentioning, actually. This might be important here, so I just wanted to share it: I’ve discussed this with the MSF team, including pharmacists, and they indicated that it would be much more convenient for them to have side effects bundled with the specific drug rather than at the substance level.