Cerner Enviza is partnering with health care AI company John Snow Labs to develop artificial intelligence tools to search patient records for side effects from the asthma drug montelukast — an early effort by Oracle, which owns Cerner Enviza and its parent company Cerner, to make use of the trove of data in electronic health records.
Using natural language processing technology based on AI models developed by John Snow Labs to understand clinical and biomedical documents, Cerner Enviza will extract information from medical notes and pair it with claims data to determine the relationship between various mental health side effects and montelukast, a drug to treat asthma and allergies marketed under the brand name Singulair. The project is part of the Food and Drug Administration’s Sentinel Initiative drug safety program.
In 2020, the agency said there needed to be a stronger warning about “serious behavior and mood-related changes” associated with the drug, which included aggression, memory problems, vivid dreams, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts and actions. The agency later issued a boxed warning for the drug and advised against prescribing it for mild allergies. The agency’s scientific advisers also acknowledged last year that there are gaps in the neurological understanding of how the drug works that need further research.
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