An artificial intelligence (AI) tool being developed at West Virginia University (WVU) could lessen medication errors that send recently discharged patients back to the hospital.
An artificial intelligence (AI) tool being developed at West Virginia University (WVU) could lessen medication errors that send recently discharged patients back to the hospital.
A release from WVU Pharmacy stated at least 1.5 million people are harmed by medication errors every year, according to the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy. They say the cost for treating these drug-related injuries occurring in hospitals alone is estimated at $3.5 billion annually.
At issue is the standard medication reconciliation clinicians perform before patients are discharged from the hospital. The prescription and treatment review is meant to develop a comprehensive but proper list of meds and treatments going forward.
The problem is, with multiple charting inputs, the procedure often becomes error prone. WVU Pharmacy professors say the AI tool will go through each of the patient’s records for the medication reconciliation process, building an alert system that shows if the patient has a higher chance of getting readmitted.
“This is where 85 percent of the errors happen,” said project leader Abdullah Al-Mamun, assistant professor in the WVU School of PharmacyDepartment of Pharmaceutical Systems and Policy. “During a patient’s time in the hospital, medications are changed to improve the outcome. The patient cannot go home with the same amounts of medications they were given in the hospital. There should be an adjustment.”
Mamun said the AI tool will go through each of the patient’s records for the medication reconciliation process, building an alert system that shows if the patient has a higher chance of getting readmitted.
In the release, Al-Mamun points to studies showing a 50 percent reduction in 30-day readmission rates when a transition-of-care pharmacist took over medication reconciliation. His project aims to make the pharmacist’s job more efficient and effective through this AI-driven tool.
“That’s where the AI comes in,” Mamun said. “It will pull all this data and using different algorithms will build a profile for the patient. That will make the process more accurate and much faster and improve medication safety.”
With grant funding, the research team will first develop an alert system prototype. The next step will be to integrate the tool into a hospital’s electronic data system and run a pilot test.
Current President E. Gordon Gee’s contract ends June 30, 2025 after 11 years in the position.
The West Virginia University Board of Governors is seeking public comment on the rules that will guide the selection, employment, and evaluation of the university’s next president. At a special meeting Monday, the board announced the public comment period will continue through April 18.
Current President E. Gordon Gee’s contract ends June 30, 2025 after 11 years in the position. Gee was named interim president in December 2013, and he previously served as WVU’s president in the 1980s. He has also served as the president of four other universities across the country throughout his career.
The university has also released a Request for Procurement proposal to engage a national search firm to assist in the hiring of a new president.
The next regular Board meeting is scheduled for April 12.
On this West Virginia Morning, it was a shock when author, musician and West Virginia University professor Travis Stimeling died abruptly in November. They were 43. Folkways Reporter Zack Harold collected remembrances from colleagues, former students and friends. He shared them recently on Inside Appalachia.
On this West Virginia Morning, it was a shock when author, musician and West Virginia University professor Travis Stimeling died abruptly in November. They were 43. Folkways Reporter Zack Harold collected remembrances from colleagues, former students and friends. He shared them recently on Inside Appalachia.
Also, in this show, farmers in America’s heartland are watching the effects of a recent federal court ruling about a popular weed killer called dicamba. The decision stops the use of dicamba, saying the herbicide can drift to injure and kill desirable plants, bushes and trees. However, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) now says despite the ruling, farmers may use existing supplies on their fields this year.
On the latest episode of Us & Them, we bring back a story from our archives about this ugly battle in farm country. Host Trey Kay and his colleague Loretta Williams head deep into farm country to hear from Bo Sloan. He’s the manager of a national wildlife refuge surrounded by farm fields where dicamba is sprayed. Here’s an excerpt from Us & Them’s “Dicamba Woes.”
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University.
Eric Douglas is our news director and producer.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
On this West Virginia Morning, we begin a new series called “Now What? A Series On Parenting.” In this ongoing, occasional series, we’ll talk with experts and explore the age old question, “What’s best for the baby?” Also, beavers are coming back to West Virginia – we learn why.
On this West Virginia Morning, we begin a new series called “Now What? A Series On Parenting.” WVPB reporter Chris Schulz recently welcomed his first child and is grappling with how much there is to learn. In this ongoing, occasional series, we ask experts what they think parents – both old and new – need to know to best raise their children.
In this first installment, we talk with Dr. Adriana Diakiw, an assistant professor of pediatrics at West Virginia University (WVU), to explore how discussions between grandparents and new parents reveal just how much advice around what’s “best for baby” has changed in just one generation.
Also, in this show, a familiar species is coming back to West Virginia. Jack Walker spoke to conservationists about how they’re preparing for new arrivals.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University.
Eric Douglas is our news director and producer.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
Curtis Tate spoke with Nicolas Zegre, an associate professor of forest hydrology at West Virginia University, about what’s behind this trend.
Flood events are becoming more frequent and severe in West Virginia, causing millions of dollars in damage to property, disrupting communities and displacing lives.
Curtis Tate spoke with Nicolas Zegre, an associate professor of forest hydrology at West Virginia University (WVU), about what’s behind this trend.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tate: What makes West Virginia and Appalachia so vulnerable to severe, frequent floods?
Zegre: When we think about floods, in particular West Virginia, we have to think about them two ways. One is what we call a riverine based flood. So the larger rivers that flood when they spill over the stream, the riverbanks onto the floodplain, which of course are normally dry areas. And so when we look at flooding in West Virginia and we see that riverine flooding, there are hot spots in the Eastern Panhandle, where we see a lot of that riverine flooding, and that’s associated with the ridge and valley, the large rivers like the Potomac, that the ridge and valley topography kind of creates these really wide river valleys that provide a floodplain and we certainly have that in other parts of the state. But when we think about hot spots in the state, the Eastern Panhandle, the riverine flooding is a big problem.
But the other type of flooding we’re concerned about in West Virginia is flash flooding. And flash flooding can happen anywhere. It can happen, certainly in our small streams and our heavily dissected headwater valleys where 85 percent of our streams in West Virginia are small streams. And, of course, we know we have people living up and down just about every hollow in West Virginia.
And so we actually have two hot spots, we have a hot spot in the West Fork watershed in that Clarksburg-Bridgeport Harrison County area. And then we also see a flash flooding hot spot kind of central to Kanawha and what we refer to as kind of the southern coalfield counties. Now, that said, flash flooding and riverine flooding does happen everywhere throughout the state. But if we’re thinking about a higher propensity for flash flooding, or for riverine flooding, we do see these emerging trends on where there is a greater probability of them happening.
Tate: So for example, in the 2016 flood disaster in southern West Virginia, was it more the second type?
Zegre: It was actually both. When they started collecting stories of what the 2016 flood looked like, and from the community and the first responder perspectives, and then when we started looking at what the floods look like from a hydrology perspective, what became clear was it was a different type of flood in different parts of the Greenbrier watershed. So around Richwood and Rainelle, for example, that was more a flash flood, a wall of water moving very, very quickly downslope.
Whereas, when you were in the White Sulphur Springs and kind of Lewisburg area, it was more of a riverine flood, where the water, the river level rose and kind of spilled over and filled the wider valley. And what’s interesting, Curtis, is when you start thinking about where the damage was, and vulnerability, and also recovery, we saw very different damage and very different approaches to response and recovery in Rainelle versus White Sulphur Springs. And we can tie that back to the different types of floods. But I should say that, in the case of the 2016 flood, there were a lot of flash floods that routed downstream that also contributed to the larger riverine flood. And so we can have multiple types of floods occurring in the same event, which is going to be related to the topography and the stream channel and what all that looks like.
Tate: What’s driving the heavier rainfall?
Zegre: So heavy rainfalls are the result of a warmer atmosphere. We think of the atmosphere as like a balloon, and if you blow up the balloon in your house in January, and it’s warm inside your house, the balloon is expanded. And if you walk outside, on that cold winter day, that balloon is going to contract, walk back inside to that warm house and then the balloon is going to expand. So that’s what’s happening with warming temperatures in the atmosphere.
With a warmer temperature, the atmosphere expands, which means it can store more water. But with warmer temperatures, there’s more evaporation of water from our soils, in our trees and our rivers and our lakes. And so, more water has been put into the atmosphere and more of that water can be stored in the atmosphere. And once the atmosphere reaches saturation, we have these very heavy intense rainfalls, and so heavy rainfall and air temperature is very clearly related. In fact, for a single one degree temperature increase, a one degree Fahrenheit increase in air temperature, the atmosphere can hold 4 percent more water. And so, as the atmosphere warms, that holds more water, and it creates more rainfall.
Tate: How much does land use, whether commercial, residential or industrial, contribute to the problem?
Zegre: Whether it is, you know, what we would call an old growth forest, or a Walmart parking lot, if you drop eight to 10 inches of rain in a couple of hours, like what was experienced in eastern Kentucky, two summers ago, there’s going to be flooding in it. Our systems just aren’t designed to handle that much water. But land use activities very much affect how quickly water runs off. And so impervious surfaces associated with industrialization, associated with urbanization, and associated with the result of surface mining, all of this routes water more quickly, more water is routed more quickly off that landscape.
And so when we think about how we mitigate these effects of extreme rainfall and flooding, putting our landscape back into forests is a really important part of this conversation. But land use is a really important driver of flooding. But I should also say that, it’s really hard to detect the effects of a single neighborhood or single mine, or a single clear-cut parcel and the effect that, that has on flooding. And so we often think about this, we know how water cycles through the atmosphere and through the earth. And so what happens when you remove forests and remove soils, that water can’t be stored and that water is not removed from runoff, so all of that goes downstream.
A new analysis of special education data hopes to advance understanding and solutions for students with the greatest need.
A new analysis of special education data hopes to advance understanding and solutions for students with the greatest need.
During the past five years, enrollment in West Virginia’s public schools has declined by nearly 10 percent. In 2017, 270,613 students were enrolled in West Virginia public schools. By the fall of 2023, that number had dropped to 245,047.
However, educators like Rachel Brown say during the same period the numbers of special education students have gone up.
“Everyone’s overworked because our numbers keep rising,” she said. “And our county has done a lot of cuts this year, because our enrollment numbers have gone down, but we couldn’t cut. Our numbers have gone up.”
Brown is the intellectual disabilities and autism (ID/AU) special education curriculum specialist for Kanawha County Schools. She oversees more than 60 self-contained classrooms across the county, where students with the most complex needs, who require the most support, are placed.
The increase is not unique to Kanawha County, the state’s largest school district.
“It’s increasing everywhere,” Brown said. “I was discussing with a specialist yesterday. Ten years ago, she was in a rural part of the county. And I was like, I bet you had a sweet, tiny little classroom of like, five, because our maximum self-contained is 12. And now in the same location, we have two self-contained classrooms at this school, and they’re both full. So that’s a huge change in over a decade.”
A new analysis from the Institute for Policy Research and Public Affairs at West Virginia University’s Rockefeller School of Policy and Politics is quantifying some of those changes.
“In West Virginia, it is a problem of some magnitude,” said Samuel Workman, director of the institute. “We’re talking between, depending on the year you look, anywhere from 40,000 to 50,000 students. So it constitutes about one in five in the current year of students, 20 percent of our students. That’s a great number of our young folks who are on independent educational plans.”
Graphs display the increase in IDEA plans in West Virginia over the past five years.
Credit: Samuel Workman/West Virginia University
Workman and his team analyzed the last five years of Individuals with Disabilities Education Act data (IDEA), from the West Virginia Department of Education. The report compiled a data set from 2017 to 2023 addressing the demographics, geography and trends in independent educational plans (IEP), in the state.
“States will monitor things like how often these kids are in normal classrooms, or standard classrooms, I should say, any disciplinary actions taken against these children, and sort of assessing performance over time, both for their sake and relative to other students,” Workman said.
Workman’s study shows the breadth of conditions – both physical and developmental – covered by IEPs. They run the gamut from difficulty with vision or hearing, to psychological issues.
The largest category is now “specific learning disabilities,” which Workman said the federal government defines as psychological problems with processing language. But categories like autism and developmental delay have witnessed increases, especially in recent years.
“Which I understand to be associated with a whole host of environmental problems in children, substance abuse in a home being one,” Workman said. “But those are the sorts of things we are seeing at least at present time, explosion is probably too strong of a word, but certainly sharp upticks in the number of children categorized within those disability categories versus the traditional sort of hearing disabilities.”
The analysis also reveals interesting demographic distributions, including the fact that a near two-thirds majority of students on IEPs are male.
Brown said her experience aligns with that finding, as does research into the diagnosing of the condition.
“We do have a higher rate of boys in our autism classrooms,” Brown said. “The research [shows] females are able to mask better, so they’re not identified as frequently or as often early on. Even with ADHD, boys are often identified before girls.”
A graph from Workman’s IDEA data analysis shows the discrepancy in IEPs between male and female students.
Credit: Samuel Workman/West Virginia University
More data and study is needed to better understand such discrepancies, as well as the relationship between the various factors driving the trends, including the opioid crisis and lack of access to resources like early childhood interventions.
Workman credits the state’s Department of Education for making the data easier to access. He hopes his study helps to make it easier to use and understand and ultimately bring more eyes to the issue.
“The way I organize data is not the way a public health person would organize the data, it’s not the way an education professional organizers data,” Workman said. “Continuing to work to make that data as integratable as possible with our public health systems and our education systems will work wonders in understanding the nature of the problem, what we’re dealing with.”
Workman said with one in five students having IEPs, the far-reaching impact of education – from the immediate impact of each student to the broader implications for workforce development and businesses – makes a better understanding of special education needs imperative.
“The degree to which we can better understand these children, help them to the extent possible to lead sort of productive, rich lives, both at home and at their place of work and all this sort of stuff, the better off the state’s going to be. So it’s a real problem with a real need for lots of eyes,” he said.
Brown agrees.
“I always have hope, that’s the best part of being a special educator, you always have to hope,” she said. “I’m hoping that this will help make special education a priority, and just education in general a priority in our state.”
