Reference:
PharmStars

The growing demand for personalized medicine has accelerated the adoption of Real-World Data (RWD) in healthcare. The Tungs' Taichung MetroHarbor Hospital in Taiwan, in collaboration with AESOP Technology, conducted research on an AI-driven Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) that leverages RWD to enable safer and more effective clinical decision-making, significantly reducing the risk of potentially inappropriate medications. The findings were published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research recently.

RWD encompasses various data types, including electronic health records (EHR), insurance claims, wearable devices, environmental factors, and social determinants of health. It offers a comprehensive view of patient conditions and treatment outcomes. However, effectively utilizing RWD remains a significant challenge.

As a key component of RWD, the EHR system is often constrained by the poor design of traditional CDSS. These systems frequently fire irrelevant or low-priority alerts and fail to provide specific recommendations for complex scenarios, such as off-label drug use, multimorbidity, and polypharmacy. This results in alert fatigue among physicians, causing critical alerts and reminders to be overlooked. Consequently, the completeness and accuracy of medical records are compromised, increasing the risk of inappropriate diagnoses or treatments and potentially threatening patient safety.

This study addresses these challenges with an integrated AI-powered CDSS that combines MedGuard (now called RxPrime) for prescription appropriateness and DxPrime for diagnostic recommendations. By analyzing 438,558 prescriptions during a year-long trial, the system delivered 10,006 actionable recommendations, achieving a nearly 60% acceptance rate by physicians. Compared to traditional systems, this AI-enhanced approach demonstrated superior precision and practical applicability in real-world clinical settings.

The results also revealed high acceptance rates in specialties such as ophthalmology (96.59%) and obstetrics/gynecology (90.01%), indicating strong applicability. In contrast, lower acceptance rates in neurology (38.54%) and hematology-oncology (10.94%) underscore the need for specialty-specific customization to address diverse clinical demands.

This research highlights the transformative potential of RWD-driven AI systems with actionable recommendations to improve patient safety and support complex treatment decisions. These advancements foster greater trust and adoption of CDSS by physicians. Furthermore, by enhancing the completeness and accuracy of medical records, these systems elevate the quality of RWD, fostering a positive feedback loop that drives future medical advancements and consistently provides a reliable foundation for data-driven healthcare.

Wrong-site surgery (WSS), a critical "Never Event," represents a failure that should never occur in healthcare. Yet, due to underreporting, the true prevalence of these incidents remains obscured, jeopardizing patient safety and healthcare management. AESOP Technology, a medical AI startup, has developed an innovative solution: the Association Outlier Pattern (AOP) machine learning model. This model offers real-time decision support and retrospective analysis, aimed at enhancing surgical safety and care quality.

According to the World Health Organization's (WHO) 2024 Patient Safety Report, a mere 38% of countries have established reporting systems for never events. In the United States, the Joint Commission documented 112 surgical errors in 2023, with wrong-site surgeries comprising 62% of these incidents. The absence of comprehensive reporting hinders the healthcare system's ability to gauge the issue's magnitude and implement effective preventative measures.

Inconsistent documentation is one of the major contributors to WSS. To address this, AESOP utilized data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Limited Data Set (2017–2020), examining discrepancies in surgical laterality. This analysis informed the creation of the AOP model—the first of its kind dedicated to addressing WSS.

Unlike traditional rule-based systems that merely verify consistency, the AOP model analyzes intricate patterns between diagnoses and surgeries. It excels in handling incomplete or ambiguous diagnostic data, achieving an accuracy rate of over 80% in identifying surgical errors, outperforming existing methods.

The AOP model empowers healthcare organizations to detect inconsistencies in medical records, identify unreported surgical errors, and enhance reporting mechanisms. This not only improves patient safety but also strengthens management systems for error prevention.

Beyond retrospective analysis, the AOP model offers real-time decision support during surgical planning. It automatically flags incorrect associations between surgical codes and diagnoses, ensuring accurate and complete records. This real-time capability reduces error risks, making the AOP model an essential tool for future electronic health record (EHR) systems.

"We are thrilled with the preliminary outcomes of our research and look forward to integrating these insights into DxPrime's patient safety features this year," said Jim Long, CEO of AESOP Technology. "Our advancements in automating surgery coding show great potential for helping physicians deliver safer care, reduce documentation time, and enable medical coders to perform better concurrent surgery coding and review when patients are still hospitalized."

Having demonstrated its efficacy in orthopedics, the AOP model holds promise for other specialties reliant on laterality, such as ophthalmology and otolaryngology. This expansion aligns with AESOP's commitment to advancing patient-centered AI solutions across diagnostics, medication safety, and now surgical safety—ushering in a new era of reliable and safer healthcare.
​