Summarizing drug information in Medline citations

Adverse drug events and drug-drug interactions are a major concern in patient care. Although databases exist to provide information about drugs, they are not always up-to-date and complete (particularly regarding pharmacogenetics). We propose a methodology based on automatic summarization to identify drug information in Medline citations and present results to the user in a convenient form. We evaluate the method on a selection of citations discussing ten drugs ranging from the proton pump inhibitor lansoprazole to the vasoconstrictor sumatriptan. We suggest that automatic summarization can provide a valuable adjunct to curated drug databases in supporting quality patient care.