When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration made reports and datasets publicly available, the agency also shared its hope that developers will use that information to create new apps.
The OpenFDA initiative is described as a platform for running queries across multiple FDA datasets that, in turn, can redeployed as applications or perhaps specific components within an mHealth app.
“These reports will be available in their entirety so that software developers can build tools to help signal potential safety information, derive meaningful insights and get information to consumers and healthcare professionals in a timely manner,” said Taha Kass-Hout, MD, the FDA’s chief health informatics officer, in a prepared statement.
The FDA also explained that OpenFDA uses an application programming interface that would enable developers to create apps on top of OpenFDA that can be used to tap into publicly available FDA information, “giving them a large amount of flexibility to determine what types of data they would like to search and how they would like to present that data to end-users."
“This enables a wide variety of applications to be built on one common platform,” officials said.
Handing over the data creates an opportunity for not just developers but also public health officials, data visualization experts, information analysts, researchers and, the agency said, even the general public.
“In the past, these vast datasets could be difficult for industry to access and to use. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, send hundreds of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to (the) FDA every year because that has been one of the ways they could get this data,” Kass-Hout wrote in a blog post. “Other methods called for downloading large amounts of files encoded in a variety of formats or not fully documented, or using a website to point-and-click and browse through a database — all slow and labor-intensive processes.”
The data sets released by the FDA are focused on adverse drug events and medication errors. Kass-Hout suggested that an mHealth developer could take the data and build an app with which patients and doctors could determine whether any other patients had a similar adverse event in reaction to a specific drug.
From there it’s easy to imagine how a hospital might harness such an app and data to try and cut down on errors, hospitalizations, bed stays and readmissions, among other things.
The FDA intends to expand the datasets to include product labeling and recalls.
“The FDA will continually work to identify additional public datasets to make available through OpenFDA,” the agency noted.
While the FDA’s vision is grand and perhaps even noble, its success will likely depend on whether developers flock to the data and someone builds a breakthrough app.
There’s certainly financial incentive to do so. According to the latest report from resarch2guidance, the global mHealth app market is poised to expand from $2.4 billion today to $26 billion as soon as 2017 — and the firm predicted that mHealth data aggregators, a type likely to tap into OpenFDA, will become “dominant participants” in the market.
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