Automated Determination of Publications Related to Adverse Drug Reactions in PubMed

Timely dissemination of up-to-date information concerning adverse drug reactions (ADRs) at the point of care can significantly improve medication safety and prevent ADRs. Automated methods for finding relevant articles in MEDLINE which discuss ADRs for specific medications can facilitate decision making at the point of care. Previous work has focused on other types of clinical queries and on retrieval for specific ADRs or drug-ADR pairs, but little work has been published on finding ADR articles for a specific medication. We have developed a method to generate a PubMED query based on MESH, supplementary concepts, and textual terms for a particular medication. Evaluation was performed on a limited sample, resulting in a sensitivity of 90% and precision of 93%. Results demonstrated that this method is highly effective. Future work will integrate this method within an interface aimed at facilitating access to ADR information for specified drugs at the point of care.