VANCOUVER—Artificial intelligence and machine learning could be a key aid in ramping up efforts to stem the overdose crisis, according to an American doctor and researcher.

Lisa Latts, deputy chief health officer for IBM Watson Health in Colorado, was in Vancouver last week to share her findings on how AI technologies are being used to better understand the complex web of factors behind issues like substance use.

The overwhelming increase in opioid addiction transcends traditional demographic boundaries, she said, making it challenging to track and anticipate in terms of its impact.

“Opioid addiction crosses socioeconomic status, it crosses racial lines … it crosses borders,” she told StarMetro in a phone interview. “Almost everybody knows someone who’s been affected.”

Last year, 366 people died of an illicit drug overdose in Vancouver, while more than 1,400 overdose deaths occurred provincewide, according to a report from the B.C. Coroner’s Service. Opioid use was involved in the vast majority of these deaths.

Latts said a Watson AI program has been used stateside in legal cases where judges do not have a lot of time to make a ruling — a similar situation to the one physicians face when trying to diagnose a patient.

The judges in these court cases, Latts said, are asked to make lightning-fast decisions based on large volumes of documentary evidence which can include informal notes from law enforcement, parental figures and medical officers.

Through “natural language processing,” an AI technology such as the Watson programs, can search those notes for valuable information that might otherwise fly under the radar of a human eye.

The Watson AI turns that information into a data set to provide the judge with a concrete look at trends, patterns and anomalies which might otherwise remain invisible, she said.

Latts’ hope is this same process could aid individuals who struggle with addiction by helping doctors identify the best options for treatment and overdose prevention.

The medical files of many Canadians — regardless of the nature of their health concerns — often include records such as notes from various health care professionals. If the data in these documents is aggregated, Latts said, it could offer a blueprint to doctors for more targeted and effective treatment options.

Latts said the North American opioid crisis was sparked in part by a combination of doctors being misled regarding the addictive potential of pharmaceutical painkillers and a lack of consolidated, patient-specific information.

“As we look back, a lot of (how the opioid crisis has progressed) has to do with changes and guidelines in the physicians community around our need to do a better job controlling pain,” she said.

In April, federal NDP health critic Don Davies called for a federal investigation into the role manufacturers of prescription opioids may have played in driving the opioid crisis. Davies said pharmaceutical companies may have misled Canadian physicians and patients regarding the addictive potential of opioid pain medications like OxyContin.

Davies’ announcement came on the heels of a series of court convictions in the United States that resulted in OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma pleading guilty to felony misbranding with the intent to defraud and mislead.

Purdue also paid $600 million to resolve a Justice Department probe — the largest settlement of its kind in U.S. history — while the company’s corporate executives pleaded guilty to misdemeanour, admitting they had purposely deceived doctors about the addictive potential of their drug.

Personal injury lawyer J. Scott Stanley, responding to Davies’ announcement, told StarMetro that many of his clients had been first exposed to opioids after being prescribed powerful painkillers in a hospital setting.

“Clients would go to the emergency room and they’d be given a party-pack of narcotics — of opioids — that on its own was enough to result in profound addiction,” Stanley said. “That was because doctors weren’t aware of how addictive these things really were.”

With a better grip on every available piece of data, said Latts, risk evaluations for individual patients could be made with greater accuracy, even by doctors who were seeing a patient for the first time — such as in an emergency room.

The B.C. Cancer Agency joined on with the Watson Health Project in April 2015, and a spokesperson for Vancouver Coastal Health told StarMetro it is conducting an assessment of its systems “in order to get to a future state in which (artificial intelligence) is actually being used.”

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Latts acknowledged that broader socioeconomic issues like poverty, homelessness, unemployment and incarceration also drive addiction. And because addressing these larger contributing factors would take an “all-hands-on-deck” approach, Latts said her hope was AI technologies could be used to co-ordinate the efforts of multiple governmental and health care departments.

“There’s not a silver bullet,” she said. “There’s not a single answer.”

But if caring for human health is understood as a job for more than one doctor or department, said Latts, artificial intelligence could provide the key to the kind of interagency co-operation that could save lives.

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