Adverse drug events (ADEs) are considered to be highly important and critical conditions, while accounting for around 3.7% of hospital admissions all over the world. Several studies have applied predictive models for ADE detection; nonetheless, only a restricted number and type of features has been used. In the paper, we propose a framework for identifying ADEs in medical records, by first applying the Boruta feature importance criterion, and then using the top-ranked features for building a predictive model as well as for clustering. We provide an experimental evaluation on the MIMIC-III database by considering 7 types of ADEs illustrating the benefit of the Boruta criterion for the task of ADE detection.