Analysis of Prescription Drug Regimen Compliance

Charles Mason

Computer Applications in Medicine REU 2006

University of Virginia

Introduction• Project Overview

• Software framework, and application to provide analysis of patients’ drug regimen compliance

• Previous Work• Amit Phull’s senior thesis• PDA application to remind patients and monitor

their compliance

Motivation• Monitoring patient compliance with their

prescription regimen is a major issue for many different fields of medicine

• Electronic Monitoring systems are currently the best way of providing doctor's with accurate information on patient compliance

• Current electronic monitoring systems have significant shortcomings

Current State-of-the-Art• Medication Events Monitoring System (MEMS)

by Aardex• Special containers record when prescription is

opened and closed• Separate software used to do basic analysis of the

data• Problems

• Costly• Containers easily lost

Goals• Provide valuable information on patient

compliance to the patient’s physician• Provide a file format to store patient compliance

data. File format should be easily extendable to include new data

• Provide extensible framework for handling patient compliance data

• Provide an application to analyze patient compliance data

Results• File format for storing patient data:

• Created an XML schema which defines a file format for storing data

• This file stores a patient’s prescription regimen as well as compliance data for the regimen

• File format takes advantage of outside tools to allow for easy modification to store more data

Results• Framework for manipulation of compliance data

• C# class library

• Provides ability to create, manipulate, and save compliance data

• Provides methods for performing statistical analysis of the data

Results• Analysis application

• Windows application written in C#• Provides doctor with information based on analysis

of patient compliance

• Allows doctor to set analysis parameters allowing the doctor to get fine-grained information

• Provides ability to generate graphs from compliance data

Demonstration

Future Work• Create application for capturing compliance

data

• Provide further analysis of compliance data