Abstract for: Modelling changes in medicine use following the introduction of IT-based health policies

Medicines use involves the prescription, transcription, dispensing, administration and monitoring of medicines. These processes are prone to error resulting in the misuse of medicines. Medicines misuse associated with prescription errors and poor compliance by the elderly living at home is a growing concern. This problem will worsen with the ageing population, development of new drugs and drug indications, shortage in the general practitioner workforce, poor communication between patients and healthcare providers and poor information management. Electronic health records could improve the use of medicines by improving access and management of patient and drug information, making work processes more efficient and reducing the workload on general practitioners. The use of medicines and electronic health record systems vary demographically. Current evaluation methods, such as pilots and trials, fail to capture these differences and changes over time and are inadequate in terms of time, cost, resources and transferability. This paper will investigate multi-scale and multi-method modelling to describe the use of medicines and evaluate alternative health record systems across different demographics over time.