US regulator to launch ‘openFDA’
pharmafile | March 6, 2014 | News story | Manufacturing and Production, Medical Communications | APIs, FDA, data, manufacturing, open fda
The FDA is planning to introduce a new digital resource in order to open up its data to the public and increase access to its information.
Called ‘openFDA’, the regulator says that developers and researchers will have easier access to FDA public data through ‘RESTful APIs’ and structured file downloads.
It says the goal is to make it simple for an application, mobile, web developer, or different types of researchers, to use data from the FDA for their work.
Its initial pilot project will cover a number of datasets from various areas within the FDA, defined into three broad focus areas: adverse events, product recalls, and product labelling.
The regulator says it will also make the raw source data available, but added that it won’t be releasing any data that could potentially be used to identify individuals or other private information.
The pilot has not yet begun, however, and the FDA says it’s ‘still hard at work’ curating and refining the data it intends to launch, “so please stay tuned for the latest updates and information on openFDA”.
The openFDA initiative is one part of the larger ‘Office of Informatics and Technology Innovation’ roadmap.
Dr Taha Kass-Hout, chief health informatics officer of FDA, said: “We are incredibly excited to see so much interest in our work and hope that this site can be a valuable resource to those wishing to use public FDA data in both the public and private sector to spur innovation, further regulatory or scientific missions, educate the public, and save lives.
“As part of my role as FDA’s chief health informatics officer, I’m working to lead efforts to move FDA in to a cutting edge technology organisation. You’ll be hearing more about our other initiatives, including cloud computing, high performance computing, next-generation sequencing, and mobile-first deployment in the near future.”
The FDA has been making much noise over the plans which now have a dedicated website and a blog, and even a new Twitter handle (@openFDA).
Ben Adams
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