FDA Makes Public Some Drug Data

FDA has made available millions of reports on medication errors and adverse events associated with prescription drugs from 2004 to 2013 as part of a new Web-based platform called openFDA. Previously, these data were available to researchers only through Freedom of Information Act requests and difficult-to-use reports. The data do not contain personal information or anything that could potentially be used to identify individuals, FDA says. The agency plans to expand the program in the future to include data on product recalls and product labeling. The openFDA platform uses a search tool that ranks results much like Google does. Users can choose which data they want to search and how the results will be displayed. “OpenFDA offers a scalable platform that can be easily searched and queried across many distinct data sets and can be easily redeployed or altered to fit a variety of purposes,” says Taha A. Kass-Hout, FDA’s chief health informatics officer.