Drug interactions are responsible for an estimated 125,000 emergency department visits annually in the Middle East — the vast majority preventable if the prescribing doctor had access to the patient's full medication list. Looms' drug interaction safety engine is designed to make that access automatic.
The screening database
The engine draws on a curated interaction database covering over 15,000 drug-drug interaction pairs, maintained in partnership with a clinical pharmacology team and updated quarterly as new interaction evidence is published. Interaction severity is graded on a four-level scale: contraindicated (never co-prescribe), major (co-prescribing requires clinical justification), moderate (monitor for interaction effects) and minor (awareness only).
Allergy and duplication checking
Alongside drug-drug interactions, the engine checks the new prescription against the patient's recorded allergies, including cross-reactive allergy patterns — for example, flagging an NSAID prescription for a patient with a documented aspirin allergy.
Duplicate prescription checking identifies cases where the same drug or therapeutic equivalent has already been prescribed and may not yet be fully dispensed.
The data quality dependency
The safety engine's effectiveness depends entirely on the completeness of the patient's medication list in Looms. Clinics that actively update patient records — rather than relying solely on patient-reported medication lists — see the most benefit. We strongly encourage clinic administrators to make medication record completeness part of the patient check-in process.