Mining Pharmacy Database Using Evolutionary Genetic Algorithm

Medication management is an important process in pharmacy field. Prescribing errors occur upstream in the process, and their effects can be perpetuated in subsequent steps. Prescription errors are an important issue for which conflicts with another prescribed medicine could cause severe harm for a patient. In addition, due to the shortage of pharmacists and to contain the cost of healthcare delivery, time is also an important issue. Former knowledge of prescriptions can reduce the errors, and discovery of such knowledge requires data mining techniques, such as Sequential Pattern. Moreover, Evolutionary Algorithms, such as Genetic Algorithm (GA), can find good rules in short time, thus it can be used to discover the Sequential Patterns in Pharmacy Database. In this paper GA is used to assess patient prescriptions based on former knowledge of series of prescriptions in order to extract sequenced patterns and predict unusual activities to reduce errors in timely manner.