Integrating Medication Alert Data into a Clinical Data Repository to Enable Retrospective Study of Drug Interaction Alerts in Clinical Practice

Current clinical data repositories primarily extract data from multiple administrative and electronic medical record (EMR) data resources (e.g., hospital and physician billing records) containing specific patient-level data including demographics, medications, laboratory results, diagnoses, and procedure codes. It overlooks the importance of EMR system-level data (e.g., medication alerts that are routinely used by physicians, nurses, and pharmacists for decision support) for the surveillance of EMR decision support tools. These medication alerts are a significant source of information for providers, to minimize avoidable adverse drug events. This study describes the integration of medication alert data into an i2b2-based clinical data repository to support the investigation of clinical events occurring around patients with anticoagulation treatment that triggered drug-drug interaction alerts. The integration of medication alerts allows us to repurpose the clinical and translational research infrastructure to conduct retrospective effectiveness surveillance of clinical decision support tools.