Pharmaceutical Care: A Challenge for EAI in Pharmacies

摘要

A new trend in pharmacy practice is to move away from its original focus on medicine supply towards a more inclusive focus on patient centered care. This new trend is named pharmaceutical care. It emphasizes the responsible provision of drug therapy for various purpose of achieving definite outcomes that improve or maintain patient's quality of life. In order to achieve these goals pharmacists are expected to assume many different functions including caregiver, communicator, teacher, life-long learner and manager. These functions set new challenges for pharmacy's information systems usability as well as pharmacist's skills to use them. A problem here is that existing pharmacies' information systems are isolated in the sense that they have their own data stores that cannot be accessed by other information systems used in pharmacies. As a result a pharmacist is burdened by accessing many systems inside a user task, e.g., in giving drug therapy for a patient. In order to alleviate this problem we have designed a knowledge-oriented EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) strategy for pharmacy's information systems. Our key idea is to revolve all pharmacy systems and applications around the shared knowledge base, and in this way avoid the problems of isolated non-interoperable systems and heterogeneous replicated data. In this paper, we present how knowledge-oriented EAI strategy can be exploited in contributing pharmaceutical care. In particular, we present how Semantic Web technologies such as RDF and OWL are intertwined in our developed solutions.