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The primary goal of drug safety researchers and regulators is to promptly identify adverse drug reactions. Doing so may in turn prevent or reduce the harm to patients and ultimately improve public health. Evaluating and monitoring drug safety (i.e., pharmacovigilance) involves analyzing an ever growing collection of spontaneous reports from health professionals, physicians, and pharmacists, and information voluntarily submitted by patients. In this scenario, facilitating analysis of such reports via automation has the potential to rapidly identify safety signals. Unfortunately, public resources for developing natural language models for this task are scant. We present PHEE, a novel dataset for pharmacovigilance comprising over 5000 annotated events from medical case reports and biomedical literature, making it the largest such public dataset to date. We describe the hierarchical event schema designed to provide coarse and fine-grained information about patients’ demographics, treatments and (side) effects. Along with the discussion of the dataset, we present a thorough experimental evaluation of current state-of-the-art approaches for biomedical event extraction, point out their limitations, and highlight open challenges to foster future research in this area.
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Barriers to Discipline: Cultural and Organizational Constraints
Medical boards are responsible for disciplining physicians who inflict egregious harm on their patients, yet they often fail to do so. This Article develops a cultural and organizational framework for explaining why boards so often fail to discipline physicians. The framework highlights three types of barriers that impede board action: 1) input barriers that prevent hospitals and clinics from reporting harm to boards; 2) processing barriers that prevent boards from taking sufficient action against physicians who do harm; and 3) output barriers that prevent boards from sharing information about physicians who do harm with other disciplinary agencies like other medical boards and law enforcement. The Article demonstrates how the interplay between these barriers reduces the likelihood that boards will discipline physicians who harm patients and also shows how boards behave like other kinds of organizations in similar situations. The Article concludes with a set of solutions to overcoming each type of barrier and explains why an organizational and cultural perspective is essential for identifying gaps between boards’ stated goals and their actions as well as for developing effective solutions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1753308
- PAR ID:
- 10320037
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Annual Health Law Symposium, Saint Louis University School of Law
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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