Will Heise, MD, FACMT

Chair, AZCERT Scientific Review Board

Will Heise, MD, FACMT, helps carry forward AZCERT’s mission: independent, rigorous medication safety review that patients, clinicians, pharmacists, and researchers can trust.

As Chair of the AZCERT Scientific Review Board, Dr. Heise provides clinical and scientific leadership for the evidence review process behind CredibleMeds. That work is guided by ADECA™, AZCERT’s systematic process for evaluating whether medicines are associated with QT prolongation and torsades de pointes risk. His leadership supports the continued integrity of the QTdrugs List, the world’s most widely used resource for understanding medicines associated with QT prolongation and torsades de pointes, a potentially life-threatening heart rhythm disorder.

Dr. Heise is a medical toxicologist and family physician with deep experience in the clinical realities of medication risk. He joined the University of Arizona faculty in 2015 and became a member of the CredibleMeds Scientific Review Board in 2016. His work spans medical toxicology, precision medicine, clinical decision support, and medication safety.

His path into medical toxicology began during medical school at the University of Iowa, when he completed an away rotation at Banner University Medical Center - Phoenix. The specialty brought together pharmacology, diagnosis, and patient care in a way that immediately fit his interests. It focused on a question that remains central to his work today: what happens when good medicines create harm?

At AZCERT, Dr. Heise helps sustain the scientific standards established by CredibleMeds’ founding leadership while advancing the organization’s relevance for modern healthcare. That continuity matters. Medication safety information must be independent. It must be current. It must be clinically meaningful. And it must be rigorous enough to support decisions made by patients, researchers, and healthcare professionals.

Dr. Heise also contributes to the scientific and clinical foundation supporting MedSafety Scan® (MedSafetyScan.org): AZCERT’s medication safety and clinical decision support platform designed to help identify patients at higher risk of drug-induced harm. MedSafety Scan represents an important part of AZCERT’s evolution, bringing the same independent rigor behind CredibleMeds into tools that can support safer prescribing and more informed medication decisions.

Dr. Heise’s role is not only to review evidence, but to help protect the standard behind the evidence. He brings the perspective of a practicing clinician, the discipline of a medical toxicologist, and the judgment required to keep CredibleMeds and AZCERT’s tools scientifically credible as medication safety science continues to evolve.

Good medicines save lives. Safe use depends on rigorous evidence, careful interpretation, and leadership that understands both science and patient care. Dr. Heise helps ensure AZCERT continues to deliver on that standard.