Improving medication safety through medical data networking | 2nd INTERPOLAR Day in Leipzig
On 31 May and 1 June about 60 participants of the INTERPOLAR project met for the second INTERPOLAR Day in Leipzig. The focus of the event was on the coordination of drug safety and care standards in hospital pharmacy services as well as the integration of INTERPOLAR IT into the infrastructure of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII).
“The Data Integration Centres of the Medical Informatics Initiative have come a long way in the last five years in terms of building the infrastructure. Now it is time to bring both the Data Integration Centres and drug safety into line with the INTERPOLAR Use Case,” said project leader Prof Dr Markus Löffler during the conference. The aim of INTERPOLAR is to improve the safety and quality of drug therapy through the use of data-driven health research. It follows on from the POLAR project, which investigated adverse drug interactions. The challenge now is to harmonise the results of POLAR, the current standard of care in clinics and the risk assessments known from the scientific literature based on real data. In order to take targeted action to reduce drug-related problems, ward pharmacists will be sensitised using IT-based risk-scoring tools and automated identification of drug-related problems.
At the INTERPOLAR Day, participants agreed on relevant elements from medications, prescriptions, laboratory values, side effects, adverse events and diagnoses. Close coordination with the Interoperability Working Group and the Core Data Set Task Force of the MII will be necessary. Procedures, unstructured information and the temporal relationships between medication orders, laboratory results and clinical decisions were also identified as essential.
In addition, INTERPOLAR-IT will act as an interface between ward pharmacy services, data-based health research and Data Integration Centres. For this purpose, INTERPOLAR-IT will be integrated into the Data Integration Centres. In this context, the participants discussed the partly consortium-based and site-specific architecture of the Data Integration Centres.
Another session was dedicated to describing the status quo of ward pharmacy services. This was discussed with the The Federal Association of German Hospital Pharmacists (ADKA) and concrete proposals for action were made. In addition to the INTERPOLAR speakers Prof. Frank Dörje, Prof. Irene Krämer and Dr. Albrecht Eisert in the “AG Apotheker”, all representatives of the 15 participating university hospitals are involved in the description of their own standard of care and interventional procedures.
Finally, the interactions of ward pharmacy staff with MII-Data Integration Centre healthcare data were discussed. Prof. Dr. André Scherag presented a novel study of the MII, based on a cluster-randomised study and using IT as well as algorithm-based risk scoring for drug testing.
The next INTERPOLAR Day will be held as a web meeting on 15 September 2023.
You can find further information about INTERPOLAR here or in the interview with pharmacologist Prof. Dr. Petra Thürmann and pharmacist Dr. Beate Mussawy.