Fellowship Bio

Dr Akish Luintel is an infectious diseases registrar and PhD student at the Institute of Global Health Innovation. He has been interested in digital health since helping launch EPIC at UCLH in 2018/2019. This led to a national role where he served as clinical lead for Risk Stratification, COVID Oximetry@home, and Shielding at NHS Digital. Currently, he is working with Professor James Teo at King’s College Hospital on using Cogstack and NLP in infectious diseases.

Fellowship Project

Targeting penicillin allergy delabelling services using structured and unstructured data

King’s College Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

6% of the UK population has a label of penicillin allergy, but fewer than 5% of patients with documented penicillin allergy have positive allergy tests. This impacts on antimicrobial resistance, length of stay, and costs. Electronic health record systems and AI could improve this problem. The project goals were to: engage stakeholders to create a penicillin delabelling service; identify inpatients with penicillin allergy; and use AI to help risk stratify patients into low or high risk of severe reaction, to target them for delabelling. The project team engaged with the immunology/ allergy, pharmacy, and microbiology teams to create an inpatient penicillin delabelling service and were successful in getting buy-in for the project.

Fellowship Testimonial

Being part of the fellowship has allowed me to develop my understanding of the AI landscape, the upcoming challenges as clinicians and the regulatory challenges on the horizon.