Discovering patterns on medication prescriptions

Today, electronic prescription in clinical scenarios is frequently used to support decision-making tasks and services monitoring in public health institutions. The huge amount of data that has been stored during last years about medication prescriptions makes now possible to apply data mining techniques with a significant success to discover patterns that could be useful to optimize medical services and resources related to medication prescription. Association rules, which are frequently used in the analysis of commercial transactions data, could be applied usefully on the medical prescriptions area. In fact, the idea of discovering medication prescriptions patterns it is quite attractive due to the wide range of new applications that can be opened to service management and optimisation. In this work, we present a study about medication prescriptions in the north region of Portugal, in order to discover some relevant patterns among medication, doctors and laboratories.