Joan Kapusnik-Uner, PharmD
Associate Clinical Professor
Clinical Pharmacy
School of Pharmacy

Dr. Kapusnik-Uner serves as Vice President at First Databank and has been in many roles at FDB since her start in 1996. She received her Doctor of Pharmacy degree from the University of California at San Francisco School of Pharmacy and advanced training in Clinical Pharmacy, Infectious Diseases and a Pharmacokinetics Antimicrobials research fellowship where she initiated research on single daily dosing of aminoglycosides and computerized research protocol data entry formats. As faculty member at UCSF she started an HIV Pharmacy Care Clinic, practiced at San Francisco General Hospital with the Infectious Disease Services and implemented a specialized antimicrobial ordering system and a stewardship program. In 1993, she received the distinguished honor of Clinical Associate Professor of Pharmacy at UCSF. Joan joined the First Databank team as the Senior Knowledge Engineer working on advanced dosing decision support and drug disease & laboratory decision support knowledge bases. Dr. Kapusnik-Uner has been a leader on First Databank's drug vocabulary standards initiatives, including past participation in the HL7 and RxNorm development with the National Library of Medicine. Joan orchestrated the design and release of knowledgebases with ICD10 and SNOMED context-sensitive problem list disease mappings, High Risk Medication decision support including actionable content for Boxed Warning drugs. Her teams are now creating knowledgebases that promote optimized alerts utilizing rich patient context for Pharmacogenomics and Advanced decision support deployments called PatientFirst.

• Quality assurance of chemical ingredient classification for the National Drug File - Reference Terminology.
  Journal of biomedical informatics 2017 Zheng L, Yumak H, Chen L, Ochs C, Geller J, Kapusnik-Uner J, Perl Y
• Comparison of three commercial knowledge bases for detection of drug-drug interactions in clinical decision support.
  Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA 2017 Fung KW, Kapusnik-Uner J, Cunningham J, Higby-Baker S, Bodenreider O
• Introducing the Big Knowledge to Use (BK2U) challenge.
  Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 2016 Perl Y, Geller J, Halper M, Ochs C, Zheng L, Kapusnik-Uner J
• Depression screening for prescribed medications with mental health risk: Considerations for clinical decision support, workflow redesign, and health information exchange arrangements.
  Research in social & administrative pharmacy : RSAP 2016 Miller MJ, Burns CF, Kapusnik-Uner J, Carreno R, Matuszewski KA
• Drug-drug Interaction Discovery Using Abstraction Networks for "National Drug File - Reference Terminology" Chemical Ingredients.
  AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium 2015 Ochs C, Zheng L, Gu H, Perl Y, Geller J, Kapusnik-Uner J, Zakharchenko A
• Recommendations to improve the usability of drug-drug interaction clinical decision support alerts.
  Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA 2015 Payne TH, Hines LE, Chan RC, Hartman S, Kapusnik-Uner J, Russ AL, Chaffee BW, Hartman C, Tamis V, Galbreth B, Glassman PA, Phansalkar S, van der Sijs H, Gephart SM, Mann G, Strasberg HR, Grizzle AJ, …
• Prevalence and Therapeutic Classifications of FDA-Approved Prescription Drugs With Boxed Warnings.
  Therapeutic innovation & regulatory science 2014 Cheng CM, DeLizza C, Kapusnik-Uner J
• Identifying knowledge gaps in the labeling of medications for geriatric patients.
  P & T : a peer-reviewed journal for formulary management 2013 Hinshaw T, Kapusnik-Uner J, Zarowitz B, Matuszewski K
• An approximate matching method for clinical drug names.
  AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium 2011 Peters L, Kapusnik-Uner JE, Nguyen T, Bodenreider O
• Methods for managing variation in clinical drug names.
  AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium 2010 Peters L, Kapusnik-Uner JE, Bodenreider O
• A concept-based medication vocabulary: an essential requirement for pharmacy decision support.
  Pharmacy practice management quarterly 1998 Broverman C, Kapusnik-Uner J, Shalaby J, Sperzel D
• The need for a concept-based medication vocabulary as an enabling infrastructure in health informatics.
  Proceedings. AMIA Symposium 1998 Sperzel WD, Broverman CA, Kapusnik-Uner JE, Schlesinger JM