A graphical user interface to facilitate patient-specific drug dosing.

This paper describes the development of a graphical user-interface (GUI) designed to facilitate the process of generating patient-specific drug doses using bayesian modelling software. The graphical user interface was developed in Visual Basic (Microsoft, Inc.) and runs under the Windows 3.1 (Microsoft, Inc.) operating system. Patient demographic data are stored in a relational database (Access, Microsoft, Inc.). The GUI and the database communicate via dynamic data exchange links. The largely object-oriented nature of the language allowed us to change the entire look and feel of the system with a few simple changes to the underlying code. Use of the relational database to store patient demographic information allows greater flexibility in searching for and displaying patient specific information. The GUI reduces the time required to enter data. The prototype has allowed us to experiment with different presentation methods, greatly improving the clinical acceptance of the dosing programs.