How Is AI Improving Medication Discovery and Management? (Marinka Zitnik)

Dr. Marinka Žitnik is a computer scientist from Harvard, studying applied machine learning with a focus on challenges brought forward by data in science, medicine, and health. A large aspect of her work concerns the use of AI for better use of medications – either by analyzing and predicting side effects in polypharmacy or by potentially discovering new indications of combinations of drugs that are already on the market.

Dr. Zitnik joined Harvard as an Assistant Professor in December 2019. Before that, she was a postdoctoral scholar in Computer Science at Stanford University. She was also a member of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub at Stanford. Some of her methods are used by major biomedical institutions, including Baylor College of Medicine, Karolinska Institute, Stanford Medical School, and Massachusetts General Hospital.

In this discussion, she talks about the role of AI in the development of COVID vaccines, the role of AI in drug development, realistic expectations of AI tools we can expect in the next 5 to 10 years, and more. 

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This discussion was part of the discussions recorded for the movie OVERDOSE – How can we prevent medication errors, featuring 10 speakers from 6 countries across the world. Find all the details about the movie along with full interviews with speakers in the movie here: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/overdose-documentary

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Why Patient Safety is Like Global Warming (Abdulelah Alhawsawi)

According to WHO the occurrence of adverse events due to unsafe care is likely one of the 10 leading causes of death and disability in the world. 

Patient harm is caused by several healthcare issues.

 Healthcare-associated infections occur in 7 and 10 out of every 100 hospitalized patients in high-income countries and low- and middle-income countries respectively (11). Unsafe surgical care procedures cause complications in up to 25% of patients. Patient harm is caused by unsafe injections practices in health care settings, unsafe transfusion practices, diagnostic errors, radiation errors, sepsis is frequently not diagnosed early enough, Venous thromboembolism (blood clots) is one of the most common and preventable causes of patient harm. On top of the list are medication errors. Medication errors are a leading cause of injury and avoidable harm in health care systems: globally, the cost associated with medication errors has been estimated at US$ 42 billion annually.

Abdulelah Alhawsawi is the Ex – founding Director-General of the Saudi Patient Safety Center (SPSC), and MOH Advisor on Patient Safety. He is a consultant to several national and international quality and safety organizations. has helped introduce Patient Safety as a G20 priority in the 2020 G20 of Saudi Arabia. Currently, Dr. Alhawsawi is part of the WHO’s Global Patient Safety Action Plan Taskforce.  He has been trying to help improve patient safety throughout his career. As he says if patient safety becomes a priority as is safety in other industries, we can improve healthcare. At the moment, however, we still lack leadership and advocacy in this field. 

In this discussion you will hear an overview of factors obstructing patient safety improvement efforts and why, the secret to improve patient safety according to dr. Alhawsawi is better involved and empowered of patients in care planning and treatment execution.  

This discussion was part of the discussion of the movie (OVER)DOSE – How can we prevent medication errors. See the movie and interviews with all the speakers: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/overdose-documentary

Browse through other episodes as well: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com. 

US clinicians – earn CME credits: https://cmefy.com/moment?id=l8BRcmC You will need to login to Adaptrack first. All the future episodes of Faces of digital health will have links for earning CME credits.

An Insight in Global Patient Safety Approaches (Lea Dias)

Lea Dias is a former Medication Safety Pharmacist at Perth Children’s Hospital, now the Founder and CEO of Quaefacta. In 2013, the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust enabled her to go on a six-week tour around the world, to visit several hospitals in the US, UK, and Israel, and assess how various institutions used technologies for patient safety improvement. Three years later, she went on another tour to get additional insights from hospitals in Bulgaria, France, Spain, UK, Singapore and Thailand. She brought the knowledge back to Australia, where she led the implementation of a pharmacy robotics system. In this discussion, we talked about medication errors she saw in her clinical practice, the causes of those errors, and what were her takeaways from the two world tours related to patient safety. Today, Lea is using all that knowledge to build her company Quafecta, which aims to empower patients to make informed healthcare decisions via ownership of their own health data. 

!!For Medical Doctors in the USA: Based on the conversations happening here & how it applies to your day-to-day, please capture your reflections here to unlock AMA PRA Category 1 CMEs: https://earnc.me/Fb5PMc

See the documentary (OVER)DOSE – How can we prevent medication errors? https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/overdose-documentary

A Glimpse In The State of Hospital Electronic Prescribing in the UK (Duncan Cripps)

Some say fax machines still exist because of healthcare. Across the world, paper is still heavily used in healthcare. The NHS is on course to eliminate paper prescribing in hospitals and introduce digital prescribing across the entire NHS by 2024. From 2018 until the end of 2020, 216 NHS trusts have received funding to implement systems electronic prescriptions and medicines administration (ePMA). 

IT implementations in healthcare take several months. Clinicians need to use several systems, learn about updates of the system. Sometimes digitalization requires more time for documenting patient care. Therefore clinicians can be disappointed that most digital solutions at the moment aren’t high-tech decision support systems that would take away the cognitive load from clinicians. Digital systems still require clinicians to basically not expect the systems to think instead of them. In this discussion you will hear from Duncan Cripps – Electronic Prescribing and Medication Management Lead at University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust. Duncan is a pharmacist by background and a lecturer. In this discussion, he outlined the current state of electronic prescribing in the UK, and talked about the challenges he sees in electronic prescribing in hospitals. One of the key things he looks forward to is the increase of interoperability between primary, secondary, and tertiary systems. This has the potential to bring a single source of truth about the patient to the physician. Consequently, transcription errors can be avoided. 

Medical Doctors in the USA – EARN CME credits: Based on the conversations happening here & how it applies to your day-to-day, please capture your reflections here to unlock AMA PRA Category 1 CMEs: https://earnc.me/Fb5PMc

See the documentary (OVER)DOSE – How can we prevent medication errors? https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/overdose-documentary

Why Aren’t Polypills Used and What Are The Limits Of Pharmacogenomics? (John Horn)

Do you know what clinical pharmacists do? For one thing, clinical pharmacists optimize patient’s medications. This can have a big impact on improving patient outcomes and patient quality of life. In today’s discussion, you’re going to hear from Dr. John Horn, Emeritus Professor of Pharmacy and Associate Director of the UW Medicine Pharmacy Services. He is co-author of the reference texts Drug Interactions Analysis and Management and The Top 100 Drug Interactions: A Guide to Patient Management. In addition to over 250 publications related to drug interactions, Dr. Horn has published in the areas of cardiovascular and gastrointestinal therapeutics and pharmacokinetics. You will hear: why are pharmacists integral team members in patient care, why is medication adherence in patients impossible to reach, dr Horn also shared his thoughts about the potential and near future of 3D printing. Teaser: he is very skeptical about seeing that work in practice.

This interview was conducted for the purpose of the movie OVERDOSE – How can we prevent medication errors. If you haven’t yet, do check out the link in the show notes to watch the movie. As part of an awareness campaign about medication safety, full interviews with all speakers from the movie will be published until the end of the summer.

See the movie and related content: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/overdose-documentary

Browse through podcast content blog posts: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog

Why Do Doctors Skip Medication Interaction Alerts? (David W. Bates)

Being a doctor can be very gratifying when a life is saved or a patient is cured. However, the number of jobs and skills physicians need to master is increasing with the advancement of technology and science. This makes the medical environment increasingly stressful, also because at the moment, many IT solutions are burdensome and add the bureaucratic workload to the schedules of doctors. Today’s topic is how to doctors approach and manage medication prescribing. I spoke with David W. Bates, Patient Safety Expert and Harvard MD, who is an internationally renowned expert in patient safety, using information technology to improve care, quality-of-care, cost-effectiveness, and outcomes assessment in medical practice. He is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he co-directs the Program in Clinical Effectiveness. He directs the Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and serves as external program lead for research in the World Health Organization’s Global Alliance for Patient Safety. He has published over 700 peer-reviewed papers. 

We discussed: 

• How is patient care changing and impacting medication management,
• Why doctors ignore alerts of decision support systems,
• What are healthcare IT systems missing in the UX design, 
• What do doctors hope to see from IT in the near future,
• And how should organisations approach patient safety culture improvements?

Enjoy the discussion, go to www.facesofdigitalhealth,com This discussion was part of a series of discussions recorded for the movie (OVER)DOSE – How can we prevent medication errors? 

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