Faculty
Richard Boyce, PhD
Research Interests
- Comparative effectiveness and safety of newer psychotropics in elderly nursing home residents
- Knowledge-based approaches to drug-drug interaction prediction and identification drug safety decision support
- Novel applications of linked health care and life sciences data (Semantic Web)
- Computational methods for simplifying biomedical knowledge-base development, curation, and use
- Applications of truth and belief maintenance systems to biomedical knowledge-representation
Appointments and Positions
Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics
Biomedical Informatics Training Program Core Faculty
Current Research Projects and Collaborations
Dynamic enhancement of drug product labels through semantic web technologies
FDA-approved drug product labeling (packages insert or PI) is a major source of information intended to help clinicians prescribe drugs in a safe and effective manner. Unfortunately, PIs have been identified as often lagging behind the drug knowledge expressed in the scientific literature, especially when it has been several years since a drug has been released to the market. In collaboration with members of the W3C HCLS IG Scientific Discourse Task Force, Dr. Boyce is creating a Linked Data store that will provide clinicians, patients, and the maintainers of drug information resources with the most complete and up-to-date information on drug information claims made within a PI. The initial focus is on 25 currently-marketed psychotropic medications (nine antipsychotics, twelve antidepressants, and four sedative hypnotics). To construct this Linked Data store, the team is using Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies identify core claims in Structured Product Labels, the scientific literature, and various web-based drug information sources that pertain to pharmacokinetic drug-drug interactions, age-related changes in clearance, metabolic clearance pathways, and genetic polymorphisms that can affect drug metabolism. Team: Richard Boyce, Anita De Waard (Elsevier), Maria Liakata (European Bioinformatics Institute), Jodi Schneider (Digital Enterprise Research Institute). Funding: Pending
The comparative effectiveness and safety of antidepressants for the treatment of depression in nursing home residents
This is a newly-approved study that will apply methods from comparative effectiveness research, pharmacoepidemiology, and biomedical informatics to compare the effectiveness and safety of antidepressants used to treat elderly adults residing in nursing homes. The aims of the study include a systematic review of antidepressant use in nursing homes and two observational cohort studies using electronic medical records in UPMC NHs. Team includes Richard Boyce, Steve Handler, Joe Hanlon and Roger Day. Funding is provided by K12 funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Grant# K12 HS019461-01 — “The University of Pittsburgh's Comparative Effectiveness Research Scholars Program“
The effect of known metabolic drug-drug interactions involving psychotropic drugs on the risk of experiencing a fall in the nursing home setting
This study is investigating if there is a clinically relevant association between pharmacokinetic drug-drug interactions (DDIs) involving psychotropic drugs and one of the most common causes of injury and morbidity among elderly nursing home (NH) residents—falls. The study is an observational cohort study in the four University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Senior Living Community nursing homes. So far we have constructed a knowledge-base that identifies highly-metabolized psychotropic medications, the specific metabolic clearance pathways they depend on, and drugs that can affect their clearance by metabolic inhibition. We are currently leveraging existing resources, including the Medical Archival System–Long-Term Care (MARS-LTC) data repository, to determine if the potential metabolic inhibition DDIs identified in the new knowledge-base are associated with an increased risk of falls among UPMC NH residents. Team includes Richard Boyce, Steve Handler, Joe Hanlon and Roger Day. Funding is provided by K12 funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Grant# K12 HS019461-01 — “The University of Pittsburgh's Comparative Effectiveness Research Scholars Program“
Recent Publications
Boyce RD, Hanlon JT, Karp JF, Kloke J, Saleh A, Handler SM, A Review of the Effectiveness of Antidepressant Medications for Depressed Nursing Home Residents, Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, 2011 Oct 20. DOI:10.1016/j.jamda.2011.08.009. PMID:22019084. [PMCID - in process]
Boyce RD, Handler SM, Karp JF, Hanlon JT. Age-related Changes in Antidepressant Pharmacokinetics and Potential Drug-Drug Interactions: A Comparison of Evidence-Based Literature and Package Insert Information. Am J Geriatr Pharmcother. DOI:10.1016/j.amjopharm.2012.01.001. PMID:22285509. [PMCID - in process]
Marshall MS, Boyce RD, Deus H, Zhao J, Willighagen E, Samwald M, Pichler E, Hajagos J, Prud’hommeaux E, and Stephens, S. Emerging practices for mapping life sciences data to RDF - a case series. Journal of Web Semantics. Special Issue: Reasoning with Context in the Semantic Web. (In Press).
Peron EP, Marcum ZA, Boyce R, Hanlon JT, Handler SM. Year in Review: Medication Mishaps in the Elderly. Am J Geriatr Pharmacother. 2011 Feb; 9(1):1-10. PMID 21459304. [PMCID - in process]
Boyce RD, Hanlon JT, Karp JF, Kloke J, Saleh A, Handler SM, A Review of the Effectiveness of Antidepressant Medications for Depressed Nursing Home Residents, Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, doi:10.1016/j.jamda.2011.08.009
Presentations at national and local meetings:
Boyce, R. “The Drug Interaction Knowledge Base -- an evidential approach to predicting metabolic drug-drug interactions,” Poster presentation at the 2011 Epistemology of Modeling and Simulation National Conference, April 2011.
Boyce, R., Hanlon, J., Handler, S. “A systematic review of studies examining the effectiveness of antidepressants for treating depressed nursing home residents,” Poster presentation at the 17th Annual NRSA Trainee Research Conference. Seattle, WA. June, 2011.
Boyce, R., Guzman, R. “A Linked-data Semantic Index of Named Drug Entities within Clinical Notes Constructed using a Publicly-available Annotation Tool,” Poster presentation at The University of Pittsburgh symposium “Science2011,” October 2011.