Technology in Pharmacy Business with Scott Carpenter

Pharmacist Turned Techie, John Shanks, Revolutionizes Healthcare

September 28, 2023

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In this episode of the Pharmacy View Podcast, host Scott Carpenter, EVBC welcomes John Shanks, the Lead Pharmacist for Antimicrobial Stewardship at the Far West Local Health District and the Director of Kraken Coding. Listen in to understand John’s journey from Pharmacy to tech and how they create groundbreaking solutions for clinical decision support.

Pharmacy View Podcast · EP 83 – Pharmacist Turned Techie, John Shanks, Revolutionizes Healthcare

John’s journey in Pharmacy began in Lithgow, with their education at Newcastle Uni, where they pursued a master’s degree in Pharmacy. They ultimately chose to focus on Hospital Pharmacy, starting with an internship at Coffs Harbor Base Hospital and eventually settling in Darwin.

John’s passion for leveraging technology in healthcare led to their involvement in IT and developing innovative tools for identifying critical patient issues. They even pursued an IT master’s degree to further their skills. John’s project to create structured pathways for pharmacist prescribing garnered attention. In the episode, they also discuss their vision for improving decision support in healthcare. John’s innovative platform simplifies the creation and sharing of clinical decision support pathways, emphasizing collaboration and customization.

John also explores their latest project involving the development of a chatbot for pre-triaging patients, making healthcare interactions more accessible and user-friendly. John’s platform offers comprehensive solutions for managing patient interactions, ensuring accountability, and fostering better decision-making in the clinical community. They express their contentment with their project’s progress and invite collaborators who share their passion for improving healthcare decision support in Australia.

In summary, John Shanks is a trailblazer in healthcare decision support, merging their Pharmacy background with innovative technology solutions to enhance patient care and streamline clinical processes.

Topics Covered

Why John chose Hospital Pharmacy
Health tech innovation
Following one’s passion
Structured pathways
Decision support made easy
Empowering patients through virtual health consultations
Call for collaboration

Key Quotes (Time Stamps)

“As a like an entry-level Pharmacist, I got a bit stressed out, as you generally do, probably tried a bit too hard.” (2:43 – 2:52)
“Quite often, I’d get worried after a busy day. I’d drive back into the hospital in the evening and just double-check charts and make sure I hadn’t missed something important.” (2:59 – 3:07)
“I started to develop some tools to identify patients of interest and help me out during the day. And I enrolled in an IT master’s degree as well to try and do it properly.” (3:24 – 3:35)
“I made another one, which was for anti-microbial decision support pathways, which we developed as an open-source project. I think we had 15 hospitals in its heyday involved in the project, and the idea was that we’d just have an open-source code base to build decision support pathways. So, it’d ask a series of questions like: Does the patient have a penicillin allergy? How is their renal function? Are they elderly? Where’s the site of infection, etc? And then it would say: in this scenario, this is exactly what you do. And it got rid of the white noise and made it so you couldn’t really make a mistake when you’re reading a guideline.” (4:28 – 5:09)
“When I was happiest in my life was when I was doing this open-source project, and I was building apps on the wards to try and like identify patients and pretending I was a genius when really it was just like a bunch of nested if statements to identify problem patients and yeah, and I thought, I’m just going to give it up and I’m going to do what I like doing, you know? And so, yeah, I just quit work altogether and started working full-time in the start-up and doing the same sort of stuff. Yeah, that’s been amazing.” (7:05 – 7:36)
“I think there are so many parallels in software development and Pharmacy, which you don’t really realize. Doing Pharmacy work has made me such a good software developer because there’s that—you’re always checking your work; you’re always making sure that you don’t make a mistake. And it’s that mindset, and it’s a procedural way of doing things. I just think they’re almost the same in a way. It sounds funny because they are completely different jobs, but they are actually almost identical in the way you do them, and it’s interesting. I think Pharmacists inherently make good software developers. That’s just learning another language, that’s all.” (9:11 – 9:56)
“The PSA has been very supportive of the idea of building pathways to help Pharmacists, not only with pharmacist prescribing but with any over-the-counter presentation and even in front-of-shop presentations.” (11:39 – 11:49)
“The whole idea is it’s just a platform to share decision support, whether it be a decision support rule to identify a patient who’s missing an INR and warfarin or something like that, or whether it’s a whole pathway on how to manage a UTI or a Cough or you name it.” (16:03 – 16:19)
“What I want to do now is build a little chatbot for pre-triaging patients, and this would either be for ED departments or Community Pharmacies to decide whether they should come by a Pharmacy or just go straight to the GP, and then what you can offer them. And so, I think it would be good for the people who are a bit socially anxious and don’t really want to come into the Pharmacy. You could just chat to a little chatbot and say, oh, this is my problem, and it’ll say, oh well, in your case, we probably recommend.” (18:44 – 19:13)
“The way it’s set up right now, all the pathway breadcrumbs go into a central database for that Pharmacy. And so you can search all the pathways that have been followed for your Pharmacy and see which direction people have been going. And now you can go back in time and search any breadcrumb and anything that results in a referral.” (24:06 – 24:25)

Social Media Clips (Time Stamps)

From Blue Mountains to Darwin: John Shanks’ Pharmacy Journey (1:04 – 2:31)
John Shanks’ Story of Going the Extra Mile (2:40 – 5:51)
Coding for Change: How John Shanks Found True Happiness in a Startup (6:18 – 7:36)
Pharmacy Meets Software (8:07 – 9:57)
Structured Pathways: The Future of Pharmacist-Driven Care (10:34 – 13:03)
Collaborative Health: John Shanks’ Platform Fosters Pathway Sharing (13:50 – 16:38)
Chatbots for Health: John Shanks’ Innovative Patient Pre-Triage (17:15 – 19:43)
Patient-Friendly AI: John Shanks’ Fun and Functional Healthcare Tool (21:50 – 23:31)
Data-Driven Pharmacy: John Shanks’ Solution for Pathway Documentation (24:02 – 24:46)
Collaboration for Change: John Shanks’ Call to Improve Clinical Decision-Making (24:57 – 25:16)