An artificial intelligence solution to alleviate the shortage of drugs

In recent years, the global shortage of drugs has increased. Furthermore, this crisis has reached an alarming level during the COVID-19 crisis. According to the American Society of Health-Systems Pharmacists (ASHP), close to 200 drugs are currently on the drug shortage list in the U.S. In Europe, drug shortages increased in 65% of pharmacies, according to the results of the survey carried out by the European Pharmaceutical Group (PGEU).

The management of drug shortages is very complicated because they can vary according to the drug and the location. On 1 September, 2020, IBM Watson Health and Orbital RX announced that they were beginning a collaboration to alleviate the effects of this crisis. 

The companies are combining OrbitalRX’s Drug Shortage Management Platform and IBM Micromedex into one unified solution called OrbitalRX and Micromedex. It combines real-time inventory awareness and clinical decision support capabilities to help hospital pharmacies proactively manage drug shortages. Furthermore, the solution identifies effective alternatives. 

OrbitalRX can help analyse the supply chain and identify clinical alternatives for drugs that are in short supply. These are the four most significant points: 

· Orbital RX eliminates the manual effort of running reports, analysing data, and transcribing information into spreadsheets. 

· It analyses the hospital’s drug inventory, purchase history, and use data to identify and procure alternatives quickly.

· It uses evidence-based drug information to evaluate evidence and comparative efficacy for clinical alternatives to help make improved patient treatment decisions.

· It removes the need to interact with multiple vendors.

The Micromedex APIs enable an application developer to embed reliable clinical evidence into applications. These are the key points:

· Daily updates to drug information evidence relied on by clinicians worldwide.

· The user can select different levels of comprehensive clinical content.

· All content is delivered in the form of a JavaScript Object Notation.

In the coming months we will be able to verify the reliability of Orbital RX and Micromedex in their work to avoid a shortage of drugs in hospitals.

Francesc Arcas Ruscalleda