Developing a desktop application for drug-drug interaction checker ordered for chronic diseases in Ethiopian hospitals pharmacy

BACKGROUND: Drug-drug interactions are a major cause of morbidity worldwide and are a leading source of treatment inefficacy. They are classified based on their pharmacological action on the body as major, moderate, and minor. Currently, it is a tedious process to remember the drug-drug interactions by the pharmacist during dispensing of the prescribed drugs for the patients. Therefore, there is a need for technology that assists the pharmacist in checking the drug-drug interaction for prescribed drugs. Therefore, in this work, a desktop-based application that can automatically identify the drug-drug interactions for prescribed drugs that could operate offline for those found in low-resource setting hospitals has been developed. To do this, around 3000 drugs along with their major and moderate interaction points were collected from Ethiopian Pharmaceutical Supply Agency. The developed system included two main parts; the database part that comprises all the drugs collected along with their major and moderate interaction points, and a patient registration platform to register the patients' history. The system was developed by using C sharp programing language. RESULTS: The developed system has both drug-drug interaction checking as well as patient registration platform. Registration of the patient’s history will be done by the pharmacist and during dispensing of the drugs to the patient, the developed system will check the interaction between the drugs prescribed. The system was tested to operate the above functions, and finally, it was able to display the major and moderate interaction points of all inserted drugs automatically and accurately. For those drugs which have no either major or moderate interaction, the system was displayed as ‘unknown’. CONCLUSIONS: The developed system assisted the pharmacist in knowing the drug-drug interaction, and enabled the patients for the resubscription of drugs with the same functional. The system would help to increase the efficiency of the pharmacist in low resource settings to do their tasks without any difficulty, and tiredness. In the future, it is recommended to include all drugs for all disease types rather than focusing only on chronic disease drugs. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40360-022-00576-4.