WALTHAM – Dr. Theodore “Ted” Pak, an infectious diseases physician-scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, is the recipient of the Massachusetts Medical Society’s 2024 Information Technology Award.
The honor recognizes the development of an information technology tool that helps physicians practice medicine, teach medicine, or pursue clinical research and comes with a $5,000 award.
This year, the award is sponsored by Click Therapeutics, Inc., (“Click”), a leader in Digital Therapeutics™ as prescription medical treatments.
The MMS Information Technology in Medicine awards have been presented annually since 2001 and many winners have seen their projects make indelible marks on science, medicine, and patient care.
Pak’s winning submission was “Massive mining of clinical notes with large language models to improve antibiotic choice for sepsis.”
“My project adapts a rapidly advancing artificial intelligence method called large language models (LLMs) into a clinical informatics pipeline that can process thousands of notes in electronic medical records,” he said. “The goal is to unlock completely
new scales of patient data for clinical researchers to analyze in large cohort studies, where we test for associations between certain patient circumstances and outcomes in order to improve guidelines on management.
“One potential application stems from my personal research interest, which is to improve antibiotic selection for sepsis. Patients with suspected sepsis often get broader antibiotics than needed, leading to higher rates of toxicity and antimicrobial
resistance. The largest studies of antibiotics for sepsis have all ignored clinical notes in favor of numeric data like vitals and lab signs, because it was considered too labor-intensive for humans to read so many notes. However, this has constrained
studies of antibiotic choice, since key data used by clinicians for this decision, like each patient’s symptoms, are only recorded in notes. I have programmed a pipeline in R and Python on our health system’s secure computing cluster to extract
symptoms from notes using LLMs. In a pilot study using notes from >100,000 patients, I found that 94% of notes were successfully labeled. Symptoms clustered into recognizable clinical syndromes, which correlated with each patient’s ultimate diagnosis
codes. Validation of a random sample showed the model had good precision, high specificity, and high accuracy. Notably, symptoms correlated with differing risks of drug-resistant infection.”
Pak, a New York native, completed undergraduate studies in Biochemical Sciences and Computer Science at Harvard College, and worked as a full-time software engineer for three years. He then matriculated into the MD/PhD program at the Icahn School
of Medicine at Mount Sinai. After medical school, he completed Internal Medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and remains there as an Infectious Diseases fellow.
The Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS) is the statewide professional association for physicians and medical students, supporting 25,000 members. We are dedicated to educating and advocating for the physicians of Massachusetts and patients locally and nationally. A leadership voice in health care, the MMS contributes physician and patient perspectives to influence health-related legislation at the state and federal levels, works in support of public health, provides expert advice on physician practice management, and addresses issues of physician well-being. Under the auspices of the NEJM Group, the MMS extends our mission globally by advancing medical knowledge from research to patient care through the New England Journal of Medicine, NEJM Catalyst, and the NEJM Journal Watch family of specialty publications, and through our education products for health care professionals: NEJM Knowledge+, NEJM Resident 360, and our accredited and comprehensive continuing medical education programs.
Click Therapeutics, Inc., develops, validates, and commercializes software as prescription medical treatments for people with unmet medical needs. As a leading innovator of Digital Therapeutics™, Click delivers accessible, clinically validated, FDA-regulated prescription treatments to the smartphone in patients’ hands. The company’s treatments prioritize technical and scientific rigor as well as patient-centric design throughout the development process, which results in uniquely engaging experiences that achieve compelling clinical outcomes for patients seeking new treatment options. Click Therapeutics is continuously expanding and refining its shared platform technologies with novel cognitive, behavioral and neuromodulatory mechanisms of action and advanced data-driven tools such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. Digital therapeutics under development on Click’s platform address diverse areas of therapeutic need, including indications in psychiatry, neurology, oncology, immunology, and cardiometabolic diseases. For more information, visit www.clicktherapeutics.com.
