How Machine Learning Can Help Identify Adverse Drug Reactions

Executive Summary

In this report, we explore how machine learning can help identify the possibility of adverse drug reactions (ADRs).

• More than half of Americans regularly take prescription drugs—four of them on average—and 75% of Americans take at least one over-the-counter drug regularly.
• About 53% of Americans who use prescription drugs get them from more than one provider and 35% state that a healthcare provider has never reviewed their medication to see if they could stop taking it.
• Annually, US hospital emergency rooms see more than1 million people for ADRs. More than a quarter of these patients need to be admitted for further treatment.
• Machine-learning algorithms, such as the Apriori algorithm, can run through vast, unstructured data sets of medications, conditions, drug effects, patient histories, and other variables, and calculate the probability of an ADR, to a certain degree.