PDCA: An eHealth service for the management of drug interactions with complementary and alternative medicines

摘要

The new era in medicine focuses on the development of tools and applications that empower citizens towards advanced health care practices and personalized approaches. Despite the vast achievements in pharmaceutical industry with innovative drugs of high specificity regarding their pharmacological mechanism of action, the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) products worldwide, is on the rise. CAM products, which are usually of plant origin (herbal medicines), are generally advertised as natural and thus harmless with minimum side effects and frequently used by citizens as part of their self-medication lifestyle. However, several studies have shown that herbal medicines, as well as other CAM products, can potentially modulate biological mechanisms that are related with the pharmacological action of drugs and thus lead to what is called drug-herb interactions. In this respect, availability of relevant eHealth services and applications providing user-friendly information to patients regarding potential interactions of CAM products that they plan to use with their concurrent administered therapy, is of paramount importance. Such services could be used by both the healthcare providers (doctors, pharmacists, nurses etc.) for advanced and personalized approaches, and by the citizens themselves for minimization of self-medication errors. In this work we present an eHealth web application that utilizes drug-herb interaction databases and provides potential notifications of interactions in a simplified and secure way, facilitating the exchange of information between the user and healthcare provider.