Formulary filtering
Dose recommendations in medication formularies often involve grouping doses into bands tailored for various patient characteristics. For instance, it might be recommended to prescribe a higher dose for an older patient compared to a younger one. Dosing content within the underlying formularies that Touchdose supports may be organised into bands based on several patient characteristics. Currently, Touchdose accommodates dose banding by:
- Age only
- Weight only
- Body surface area only
- Age and weight
- Age and body surface area
- Additionally, sex banding may be combined with any of the above combinations.
Partial patient inputs
The supported banding patterns mentioned above indicate that certain dose recommendations in an underlying formulary may require varying degrees of patient inputs. For instance, a dose for adults that is consistently 500mg necessitates only the mandatory input of the birth date (converted to age). On the other hand, a dose for a child, banded by age but dosed against ideal body weight, requires inputs of age (mandatory), sex (mandatory), body weight (mandatory in children), and length (optional) to identify and calculate the correct dose. Within any given formulary, there are medications and conditions containing doses that may demand different levels of input data.
To streamline the user experience and avoid the users from having to enter patient inputs that may not be needed to provide dosing recommendations, clinicians are only prompted to enter optional parameters if those parameters are needed to generate a dosing recommendation based on the selected medication and indication. The patient-input-specific list of medications and indications is filtered based on available patient information, and it includes content specific to certain patient groups where the discriminating patient parameter is unknown. Missing patient parameters are not requested when displaying the list of medications and indications because they may only be needed for specific indications. For example, if a medication can be used for both 'pain' (dosage relative to ideal body weight, e.g., 1mg/kg IBW) and 'headache' (with a fixed dosing recommendation of 50mg), the list of indications will show both 'pain' and 'headache' without requiring the patient's height because if they select the 'headache' indication the height will not be needed. This approach prevents unnecessary demands for patient information and enhances the efficiency of the prescribing process in Touchdose.