Prescription Basket Analysis: Identifying Association Rule Among Drugs in Prescription of Dentist in Bhubaneswar City

Amount of clinical and diagnosis data produced within the healthcare industry has grown to be vast, and thus, it provides a prospective for data mining research. Data mining is the process of pattern discovery and extraction which originally used in the field of marketing and now been used effectively in other fields such as bioinformatics, immunology, and nuclear science. Discovery of knowledge has potentially possibilities and thus will enhance the quality of health care to patients. Drug manufacturer needs to use the information efficiently and to discover patterns from large data and build predictive models. The objective of prescription basket analysis is to identify association rules between groups of drugs prescribed by dentists in their prescription. The data have been collected from the prescription of the dentists from different dental colleges as well as the dental clinics. Apriori algorithm applied to data collected from the prescriptions by dentists, and various association rules were found from the prescription data. It can provide information to pharmacy store to understand the prescription behavior of dentists which can help the pharmacy store in correct decision making in keeping their inventory. The research tried to discover the prescription behavior and association between drugs. Based on the result, the manufacturers can redesign their marketing strategy in the intention of improving patient care and thus decreasing healthcare cost. The results will reveal valuable insights into the association between drugs prescribed by dentists.