Adverse drug event prevention in neonatal care: a rule-based approach.

Adverse drug events (ADE) in a neonatal unit can be of great importance due to the underlying nature and the special characteristics of the patients. This paper presents our work on the development of a knowledge base (KB) for supporting the identification and prevention of ADEs. First, a literature review was conducted to identify ADEs observed through the use of the most commonly-used drugs in a specific neonatal unit. Then, the acquired knowledge was encoded according to an ontological data model developed for the representation of the specific facts for the neonatal unit. Finally, a rule-based prototype consisting of 164 rules was implemented in order to represent and simulate the inference procedure about preventing ADEs.