OpenFDA Initiative To Share Health Datasets Launched

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

FDA complies with presidential order to make government data accessible.

OpenFDA has been launched as a new initiative in the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Informatics and Technology Innovation spearheaded by FDA’s Chief Health Informatics Officer. According to the FDA website, this will allow access to FDA public data and showcase projects using these data in both the public and private sector to further regulatory or scientific missions, educate the public, and save lives.

Created in response to a presidential executive order to make government data more accessible,
OpenFDA will offer data in a structured, computer readable format to quickly search, query, or pull massive amounts of public information from FDA datasets on an as-needed basis.

The FDA asserts that these publicly available data sets, once successfully integrated and analyzed, can provide knowledge and insights that cannot be gained from any other single source. The need for a federal database comes because access to healthcare data has not always been easy.

“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 FDA every year because that has been one of the ways they could get this data,”   According to the OpenFDA website. “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.”

OpenFDA uses a search-based application programming interface (API) to collect large amounts of existing publicly available data, offering developers the ability to search through text within that data, ranking results much like a search using Google would do. This method then allows them to build their own applications on top of openFDA, 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, according to the agency.

The website is also quick to assure that it will not release any data that could be used to identify any individuals or reveal other private information.

For more information, see: http://open.fda.gov/.