Pharmacoinformatics: equations for serum drug assay error patterns; implications for therapeutic drug monitoring and dosage.

Pharmacoinformatics is the area of Medical Informatics concerned with modeling and simulation of the behavior of drugs, and control of such behavior by individualized dosage regimens for each patient to achieve explicitly chosen therapeutic goals. The credibility of serum concentration data is a major factor in such modeling. The present report examines a more precise way of describing the credibility of such data with a collection of polynomial equations, developed from routine survey data of the College of American Pathologists, which improve the description of the credibility of serum level results when compared to the usual practice of describing the assay coefficient of variation in the usual manner and then not using such information either in population pharmacokinetic modeling or in actual therapeutic drug monitoring. These equations can be used until each laboratory can develop its own assay error patterns with its own similar polynomial equations.