Patient Condition Change Network for Safe Medication Recommendation

As an important task of natural language processing, medication recommendation aims to recommend medication combinations according to the electronic health record, which can also be regarded as a multi-label classification task. But patients often have multiple diseases simultaneously, and the model must consider drug-drug interactions (DDI) of medication combinations when recommending medications, making medication recommendation more difficult. There is little existing work to explore the changes in patient conditions. However, these changes may point to future trends in patient conditions that are critical for reducing DDI rates in recommended drug combinations. In this paper, we proposed the Patient Condition Change Network (PCCNet), which models the current core medications of patient by mining the temporal and spatial changes of patient medication order and patient condition vector, and allocates some auxiliary medications as the currently recommended medication combination. The experimental results show that the proposed model greatly reduces the recommended DDI of medications while achieving results no lower than the state-of-the-art results.¹¹The code is available at https://github.com/master032/PCCNet