Digital Pharmacist Digest Inaugural Post

Welcome to the first edition of the digital pharmacist digest!

I'm Kevin, a digital health pharmacist and product working to improve patient safety by bridging the divide between technology and healthcare.

Digital Pharmacist digest is the free newsletter with links and snippets of the most interesting stories I've read in health 💊, tech 📱, and product management 💻. You’ll be able to read my thoughts on digital healthcare and follow my progress tinkering with technology such as AI.

As a 2023 goal, it means a lot to me if you join other health professionals, tech enthusiasts and health informaticians by subscribing to the newsletter. If you have any comments or feedback, don't hesitate to reach out!

Thanks for reading,
Kevin

📖What I'm reading

💊 Patient safety - Beyond mixed case lettering: reducing the risk of wrong drug errors requires a multimodal response

A recent study has shown mixed case text enhancement for drug names on labels reducing in selection errors from 5.3% to 0.7%. More opportunities should also be explored such as increasing the availability of barcode scanning, improving the medication management user interface designs, and other text enhancements such as colours.

🩺💻 Health informatics - Development and evaluation of an interoperable natural language processing system for identifying pneumonia across clinical settings of care and institutions

The authors generated a rule-based natural language processing algorithms to identify a diagnosis of pneumonia within emergency, radiology and discharge notes. Furthering this, the authors applied the models to another institution to assess interoperability with customisation to accomodate the different note structures and electronic health records used. Well worth a read as it describes considerations when choosing the choice of algorithms (e.g. rule-based compared to machine learning) and the need for scalable clinical analytics across the multitude of digital health systems used in healthcare.

🤖 Artificial intelligence - Innovating Faster on Personalization Algorithms at Netflix Using Interleaving

How Netflix uses the interleaving technique to accelerate ranking algorithm innovation to quickly test a broad set of new algorithms within a matter of days compared to A/B testing.

✍ Productivity - Shopify is axing all meetings involving more than two people in a remote work ‘calendar purge’ that the company itself calls ‘fast and chaotic’

A brave experiment by Shopify adapting to remote work. It’ll be interesting to read a follow up on how effective it has been.

🎈 Extra - Misspelling of antimicrobials by healthcare professionals | The BMJ

Turning an analysis of antimicrobial misspellings in electronic health records into a bit of fun. My favourite one is Caspafungin - the friendly ghost 👻