Automated Polypharmacy Review: Catching Drug Interactions Across Multi Drug Regimens
· 4 min read
A patient on 5 drugs has 10 possible pairwise interactions. A patient on 8 drugs has 28. A patient on 12 drugs has 66. The formula is n*(n-1)/2, and it grows fast.
Nobody checks all of them manually. Clinical pharmacists performing medication reconciliation focus on the drugs they know are dangerous together and rely on memory for the rest. That's where things get missed.
Here is a script that takes a medication list and checks every pair, generates a severity matrix, and identifies which drugs need renal or hepatic dose adjustment.