Analysis of Requirements for the Medication Profile to Be Used in Clinical Research: Protocol Feasibility Studies and Patient Recruitment

A “Medication Profile,” the information about the medicines a person is using and has used, is a core part of many electronic health record systems and summaries. However, there is little objective research into the data elements that the profile should contain to support the uses it must serve. With the increasing emphasis on secondary uses of electronic health information, as well as supporting the requirements to support direct to patient care, the Medication Profile should also support the requirements from clinical research. However, there is little, if any, description of these available. This paper describes an analysis of a set of study eligibility criteria that was undertaken to investigate which medication-related data elements would be required to support two clinical research use cases: the parameters to query a patient's Medication Profile to assess their suitability for entry into a trial (patient recruitment) and the parameters to query a set of Medication Profiles in a data warehouse to assess whether the eligibility criteria as described would yield a reasonable cohort of patients as potential subjects (protocol feasibility). These medication-related data elements then become information requirements that a Medication Profile should ideally meet, in order to be able to support these two uses in the clinical research domain.