Feasibility Study of Using Cancer Related Electronic Health Records with Artificial Intelligence to Enhance Patient Medication Safety

Summary

Pharmacists are essential to medication safety. They ensure that treatments prescribed are safe for individual patients, taking into account a number of factors, such as kidney function, liver function, other diseases and other medication taken by the patient. These checks are particularly important for anticancer treatments, as they have a high risk of causing serious toxicity.

Due to an increase in the volume and complexity of anticancer treatments prescribed, the pharmacists have less time to spend with patients. This leads to lost opportunities for medication counselling (improving how patients take their medicines), reducing drug wastage, and ensuring best use of medicines. It also limits pharmacists' ability to extend their prescribing roles into additional outpatient clinics or in identified settings for inpatients (for example prescribing treatment to prevent blood clots), and limits time for developing guidelines and undertaking audits or research.

This project will aim to use artificial intelligence to increase the amount of time pharmacists have available to spend with patients. The feasibility stage will focus on ensuring the cancer related health data extracted (that will be used by the artificial intelligence) is accurate and in a suitable format. It will identify 'missing' data. In the next stage of the project artificial intelligence will undertake part of the pharmacist's checking process, and we will assess if artificial intelligence is "as safe" or even maybe "better than" the pharmacist.