Friday, June 13, 2014

openFDA a Game Changer?

I’ve been fascinated by innovative people in the FDA organization since I had the pleasure to meet Dr Norman Stockbridge, the father of FDA’s Janus datawarehouse model, F2F back in 2005 in Washington, DC. 

So when I saw some early notes about an openFDA initiative in June 2013 and early 2014 I posted a couple of tweets.



In April I wrote a short blog post about openFDA. And, when I saw how the new Chief Health Informatics Officer at FDA, Taha Kass-Hout (@DrTaha_FDA) started to count down on Twitter a couple of weeks ago I got really excited. It was nice to follow the #hdpalooz feed on Twitter from the health care data event in early June when openFDA was launched.


And, also to see services that directly were picking up the first openFDA API and launced services and apps to search the 3.4 million adverse events, such as Research AE

For a brilliant intro to what sits behind the first openFDA API I recommend Alex Howard's (@digiphile) excellent article: openFDA launches open data platform for consumer protection openFDA launches open data platform for consumer protection.
"Instead of contracting with a huge systems integrator.. FDA worked with a tiny data science startup.. to harmonize the data, create a cutting-edge website, and write and release open source code for a data publishing platform for it [on GitHub]"

I think this will be a game changer for how we think about open data, open source and open communities in industry. And yes, I do think we will soon will see much more Open, and Linked Data from FDA, and hopefully also from EMA and across industry.

Kudos to the devlopers behind all of this great work,
e.g. Sean Herron (@seanherron) and  Brian Norris (@Geek_Nurse)

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