Improving the Semantics of Drug Prescriptions with a Realist Ontology

Electronic prescriptions are supported as a means to reduce adverse drug events, but the ambiguities and overspecificities of prescription semantics along with their lack of standardization reduce adoption, limit interoperability and are potential sources of error. Ontologies in the OBO Foundry, founded on realist methodology, have been successful in fostering the logical, scientifically accurate data standards that the domain of drug prescriptions is currently in need of. This paper illustrates some problems regarding the structuration of current electronic prescriptions, and demonstrates how the Prescription of Drugs Ontology (PDRO) addresses these issues with improved semantics founded on OBO and realist principles. PDRO reuses classes and object properties from IAO, OBI, OGMS, OMRSE and DRON, introducing new entities within its scope and proposing entities within those of its imported domains that may be useful to other health care and information artifact-related ontologies in the OBO Foundry. PDRO aims at improving the semantics of drug prescriptions and prospectively enabling the interoperability of prescription data. Keywords—Prescription; e-Prescribing; Drug product; Dosing Instructions; Ontological Realism; Informational Entity; Deontic