Due to the increasing aging population, the number of people with a combination of chronic conditions is expected to increase dramatically in the coming years. These are patients who often take several medications at the same time. Not all combinations of medications are beneficial and safe. This simultaneous medication use is not well investigated in scientific studies because the group of patients with a combination of chronic conditions is often excluded due to their complexity.
Vulnerable to side effects
“The result is that there is insufficient evidence of safety for combining a prescribed drug with medication the patient already has. And that, in turn, increases the risk of side effects. This is especially problematic for patients with chronic kidney disease, who often also have other chronic diseases,” Klopotowska said. “These kidney patients are vulnerable to side effects and would benefit greatly from a careful prescribing policy that takes a careful look into their personal situation.”
Medication safety tool
Klopotowska will receive 1.6 million from NWO to set up a tool that will ensure greater medication safety for the abovementioned vulnerable patient group with multimorbidity. Part of this amount comes from the Nierstichting. With this money, Klopotowska and colleagues from the Department of Clinical Information Sciences at Amsterdam UMC and from the Department of Computer Science at VU University will create a 'learning medication safety tool'. This is a tool that continuously learns from what goes well and what can be improved based on data on medication use of individual patients. In this tool, machine learning is used to continuously produce new knowledge from patient data.