Objectives
The project pursues a series of interconnected objectives, supporting the development of the solution from the design stage through to clinical validation:
- analyse functional requirements and the needs of end users, particularly general practitioners, in order to define the scope of the use case;
- develop a pipeline for processing Summaries of Product Characteristics and automatically extracting key points of attention through Retrieval-Augmented Generation and prompt engineering;
- develop a pipeline for analysing clinical reports and medical records;
- implement a comparison engine capable of automatically generating structured warnings;
- build a React front end for displaying alerts and warnings;
- validate the solution in a real-world setting with the involvement of a selected network of physicians.
Initial Challenge
With 15.7 million people over the age of 65 expected in Italy by 2030, the national healthcare system is facing a continuous increase in chronic conditions and comorbidities. This trend makes treatment management more complex and increases the risk of prescribing inefficiencies. General practitioners and specialists do not always have access to integrated digital tools capable of verifying, in real time, whether a prescribed medication is compatible with a patient’s clinical profile.
Solution
The application supports physicians by analysing clinical reports or medical records and then providing two types of output:
- medication-related alerts based on the content of the drug’s Summary of Product Characteristics and on the patient’s characteristics, conditions and clinical history available to the system, always including a reference to the relevant source;
- research suggestions enabling physicians to explore internal or external scientific literature quickly and remain up to date.
Benefits
The expected benefits of the project span several areas, from clinical safety and data traceability to operational and economic sustainability:
- transparent and traceable decision support for physicians, without replacing their clinical expertise;
- reduced risk of prescribing errors and adverse drug reactions;
- use of native Italian-language datasets that are more closely aligned with Italian clinical practice;
- a modular architecture that can be integrated through APIs into hospital and outpatient information systems;
- potential reductions in healthcare costs associated with overprescribing and therapeutic inefficiencies;
- scalability into adjacent markets, including health insurance and the pharmaceutical industry.
IFAB’s Role
IFAB participated in the project as an advisory partner, contributing its expertise in research, innovation and technology transfer. Its role involved providing technical and methodological support to the project partners throughout all stages of development, from needs analysis to solution design, while ensuring both scientific rigour and practical applicability. This involvement further confirms IFAB’s mission as an accelerator of high-impact initiatives for the local area and the wider production ecosystem.
For further information, please contact: projects@ifabfoundation.org
