Vignesh Subbian Joins Drug Interaction Alert Research Team

Assistant professor of biomedical engineering Vignesh Subbian is working with College of Pharmacy professor Daniel Malone and his team to improve the usefulness of drug interaction alerts.

Each day, health care providers are bombarded with electronic notifications alerting them to potential drug interactions, but many go unread because they are irrelevant, dismissed by the physician out of haste, or common knowledge.

Subbian and Malone are working with Sheila Gephart, associate professor at the UA College of Nursing -- and several internationally renowned experts in the field of drug-drug interactions from other institutions -- with the help of a five-year, $1.58 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The team is developing “Meaningful Drug Interaction Alert,” a system of algorithms that work with a drug-interaction database to provide relevant, patient-specific alerts about drug interactions.