Design and Evaluation of a Pharmacy Medication Safety Platform for Reducing Prescription Errors in Ambulatory Multispecialty Care
Abstract: Multispecialty hospitals routinely expose patients to several independent prescribers, and this fragmentation makes it difficult for any single clinician to see the complete medication picture. Cardiology, nephrology, pulmonology and endocrinology teams frequently prescribe for the same ambulatory patient without a shared, real-time view of what has already been ordered elsewhere, and this gap is a well-recognised driver of drug duplication, drug-drug interactions, contraindicated combinations and dosing errors. This work describes the design and preliminary evaluation of a pharmacy medication safety platform intended to close that gap. A structured knowledge base was built from peer-reviewed literature and established drug-information resources covering five clinical specialties, and each eligible drug pair or medication-related problem was classified as a synergistic effect, an antagonistic effect, a therapeutic duplication, a contraindication, a drug-drug interaction, or a dose-related error. The platform links every prescription to a single, unique per-patient identifier so that medication histories generated in one department remain visible to prescribers in another. A rule-based screening engine, referred to here as the Cross-Interaction Decision Guard, compares each newly entered drug against the patient's existing medication record in real time and returns a severity-tiered alert together with the clinical reasoning behind it and, where appropriate, a safer alternative. Representative test scenarios drawn from the literature confirmed that the platform correctly identified synergistic and antagonistic combinations, cross-department duplication, established drug-drug interactions and dose-ceiling violations. The findings support the feasibility of a centralised, severity-tiered approach to ambulatory medication safety and indicate that such a system could meaningfully reduce preventable prescription errors once validated prospectively in a live clinical setting.
Keywords: Clinical decision support system; medication safety; prescription errors; drug?drug interaction; adverse drug reaction; ambulatory care; polypharmacy
How to Cite?: C. Mani Murugan, Arunmathi E, Arun Mozhi N, Aseel Umar T, Ashik Mydeen M, Athi Raj S, "Design and Evaluation of a Pharmacy Medication Safety Platform for Reducing Prescription Errors in Ambulatory Multispecialty Care", Volume 15 Issue 9, September 2026, International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), Pages: 1572-1580, https://www.ijsr.net/getabstract.php?paperid=SR26924160755, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21275/SR26924160755