Development of an educational research software for detection of clinically important drug-drug interactions

Abstract

The aim of this study was to develop a free, simple stand-alone educational research software (ERS) to assist medical and healthcare students or professionals in detecting clinically important drug-drug interactions (CIDDIs). Μaterials and methods: The prototypic tool was based on a Microsoft Access 2010® database with Microsoft C# 2010 Express Edition2010 ® as the user interface. It can be distributed on Compaq Disk (CD) and be run on any Personal Computer (PC) on Windows. Results and discussion: The developed (ERS) -which we have called DDIS v.1.0- currently has data for 106 drugs used in the design. It doesn’t require wide knowledge and expertise in computers. When the user logs into the system, a default page appears prompting him/her to select one or more drugs to test for interactions. The interaction is one-to-many; it will be tested on all the drugs already selected. The pair in which we have interactions will be shown in test outcome table. Conclusions: The free (ERS) could be a useful teaching tool in medical and healthcare education. Future work should focus on further evaluation of its accuracy,
its usefulness on the teaching process and its acceptance by the healthcare students or professionals