A Secure Intelligent Decision Support System for Prescribing Medication

The process of electronic approach to writing and sending medical prescription promises to improve patient safety, health outcomes, maintaining patients’ privacy, promoting clinician acceptance and prescription security when compared with the customary paper method. Traditionally, medical prescriptions are typically handwritten or printed on paper and handdelivered to pharmacists. Paper-based medical prescriptions are generating major concerns as the incidences of prescription errors have been increasing and causing minor to serious problems to patients, including deaths. In this paper, intelligent eprescription model that comprises a knowledge base of drug details and an inference engine that can help in decision making when writing a prescription was developed. The research implements the e-prescription model with multifactor authentication techniques which comprises password and biometric technology. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, using C# programming language, and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database were employed in developing the system’s front end and back end respectively. This work implements a knowledge base to the e-prescription system which has added intelligence for validating doctor’s prescription and also added security feature to the e-prescription system..