Yoona Kim of Arine Shares How AI Improves Medication Adherence Amongst Patients Facing Racial Disparities l AMCP 2023

In this interview Yoona Kim, PharmD, PhD, co-founder, CEO of Arine Inc., addressed a few topics on the relationship between racial health disparities and medication adherence. Kim also shared positive outcomes in this relationship through a partnership with SCAN Health and the adoption of AI practices.

When describing the relationship between the two, Kim first noted that medication adherence is very important to manage chronic conditions and that medications for them need to be taken on a regular basis.

"Due to many of the social and economic inequities that have occurred over time, there's certainly disparities in medication adherence among certain races and ethnicities," she said. "That's due to lack of trust, language barriers, economic barriers. In SCAN's population, what we saw was there was a 3% gap in medication adherence between the Black and Latinx members versus white members — it was 85% versus 88%. In adherence, that is a significant gap.

"We see this across many of our customers as well, where one of the predictors of non-adherence happens to be that race and ethnicity data."

Kim shared how AI tools have helped combat this issue.

"So AI allows us to take advantage of all this (economic, cultural, social, behavioral and demographic) data that's there and look to understand the causes of disparities, and understand the reasons for things like non-adherence so that we can further personalize care," she said. "The main things we do (in our platform), we have models that target the right members for outreach and models that target the right intervention; AI helps with all of that. Then what we're doing is we're looking at which interventions are leading to the best outcomes..."

This practice includes using a model called adherence trajectory with the data. This tool or model allows professionals to look at patterns of adherence, which members are going in and out of.

From there, interventions can be built to personalize care around the barriers needed to be most met for patients.