Coding drug effects on laboratory tests for health care information systems.

Drugs interfere with laboratory diagnostics. This interference is not only confusing for clinicians but may lead to wrong diagnoses or treatments as well as unnecessary further tests. However, at the moment the drug-laboratory interferences are usually ignored in patient care because clinicians do not know or remember these properties of drugs. In Turku University Central Hospital we are now able to bring this information automatically available for clinicians by using a computerized system for linking individual patient medication data with laboratory information system. For this purpose, we are building a rule base containing the effects of drugs on laboratory tests. In order that the rule base would give the maximum benefit for all users, even other hospitals, the data included have to be classified and coded properly taking into account the various requirements and needs of all users. In this paper we introduce a coding scheme for classification and coding of drug effects on laboratory tests.