Scaling medication safety and enriching data interoperability

Scaling medication safety and enriching data interoperability across McGill University health centre

Standardizing medication data to prevent dosing errors and unlock AI-ready health research across hospital networks.

This project addresses a critical challenge in healthcare: medication data is often fragmented and poorly standardized, which can lead to preventable dosing errors and hinder medical research. By building a secure data pipeline within the McGill University Health Centre, we are transforming these siloed records into a high-quality, standardized format using international standards like OMOP and FHIR.

Currently, the lack of standard language across medical records makes it difficult for doctors to see a complete picture of a patient’s medications. Our work creates a "Rosetta Stone" for this data, allowing systems to talk to each other seamlessly. This ensures that safety tools can automatically flag risky dosing patterns in near real-time, protecting patients, starting with children in the emergency department and expanding to adults.

By the end of this project, we aim to have a fully functional, scalable system that not only improves daily patient safety but also prepares the hospital for the next generation of AI-driven research. We are creating a replicable playbook so that other hospitals across Canada can adopt these same safety and data standards, fostering a national network of secure, precision medicine.

"We were inspired by the clinical need to eliminate preventable medication errors. Currently, fragmented practices and poorly standardized records lead to significant semantic mismatches that hinder patient safety and underpower the analytics and safety monitoring for precision medicine. By bridging the gap between hospital data warehouses and the patient's bedside, we are ensuring that high quality interoperable data acts as the catalyst for the highest standard of patient care and precision treatment." Project team