WALTHAM – Arya Rao, a second-year MD-PhD candidate in the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD program at Harvard Medical School and the chair of the MESH AI group at Massachusetts General Hospital, has been named 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.
This year, the award is sponsored by Click Therapeutics, Inc., (“Click”), a leader in Digital Therapeutics™ as prescription medical treatments and comes with a $5,000 award.
The MMS Information Technology in Medicine Award has been presented annually since 2001 and many winners have seen their projects make indelible marks on science, medicine, and patient care.
Rao’s winning project was “The Future Patient Persona: An Interactive, Large Language Model-Augmented Harvard Clinical Training Companion.”
“The project is based on an artificial intelligence (AI) technology designed to simulate patient interactions for medical students,” Rao explained. “It uses advanced language models trained on custom medical education materials to generate interactive
patient scenarios for medical education. Our tool, called a Standardized Patient Large Language Model (SP-LLM), allows students to practice clinical reasoning, patient interaction skills, and receive immediate and actionable feedback, all in a
controlled digital environment. SP-LLMs aim to supplement traditional standardized patient encounters in medical education, offering a cost-effective and stress-reducing alternative and/or supplement to traditional objective structured clinical
examinations (OSCEs).
Rao graduated from Columbia University in 2022, where she studied Biochemistry and Computer Science. She broadly aims to apply novel machine learning methods to problems in healthcare, ranging from therapeutics to medical education to administrative
efforts.
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.
