INTERPOLAR team starts work in the project
Work on the INTERPOLAR project got underway with a kick-off meeting on February 10. In a first online meeting, all sites involved in INTERPOLAR came together to create a common basis for the start of the project. The project leader Prof. Dr. Markus Löffler, Director of the Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology at the University of Leipzig, presented the planned course of the study and stated the goals that should be achieved by the end of the project.
The main goal of the INTERPOLAR cross-consortium clinical use case is to develop algorithms that identify patients at particularly high risk for medication errors and side effects. This will be done through a risk score that assesses inpatients according to their potential susceptibility to drug interactions. On this basis, ward pharmacists in the hospital will propose a ranking for ward rounds. An intervention study will be conducted to confirm that targeted staffing of ward pharmacists leads to more efficient detection of potential medication errors. Adverse side effects could thus be prevented. INTERPOLAR builds on the cross-consortium POLAR use case, which was funded from 2020 to 2022 under the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII).
After presenting the study process and objectives, all 20 sites introduced themselves individually with their staff. A total of 84 INTERPOLAR employees from the fields of IT, medical informatics, pharmacy and pharmacology were present.
Prof. Dr. Renke Maas, Professor of Drug Therapy Safety and Clinical Pharmacology at Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen, and Prof. Dr. André Scherag, Director of the Institute for Medical Statistics, Informatics and Data Science (IMSID) at the University Hospital of Jena, took on the role of deputy project leaders. Dr. Daniel Neumann from the Institute of Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology (IMISE) at the University of Leipzig is responsible for scientific project management. Administrative project management is the responsibility of Jenny Kaftan from the SMITH ffice.
The INTERPOLAR project is funded from January 2023 to December 2026. More information about INTERPOLAR can be found in the current “5 questions to…” or on the INTERPOLAR overview page.