FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data
1–10 of 28 posts
Re: FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data
#2Hey guys, I'm an owner of DrugCite.com, we've talked to the FDA a few times over the last few years while building our site (They contacted us at various points with questions). They let us know last August they would be releasing this site but I guess I never thought it would so close to ours. Examples:
Our Drug Page:
http://www.drugcite.com/?q=ABILIFY
FDA Drug Page
http://open.fda.gov/drug/event/
Looks like they're including some data we didn't previous have access to or know about. Anyways, make no mistake this is huge and will be incredibly useful for doctors and patients everywhere, this is some great data. This is the type of data that should be investigated before you take any medication, prescription or not. I can see some of this data becoming common label information shortly.
Re: FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data
#3If you're interested in this, you should also check out the UMLS published by the National Institutes of Health.
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/
It's a very big semantic database of health terminology. Among other things, it has a subset called RxNorm that contains all currently prescribe-able prescription drugs.
I've been very impressed with it and I feel like not enough people have heard of it.
Re: FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data
#4Impressed, very very useful. Thanks!
Re: FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data
#5Great to see this on HN! I'm one of the openFDA core team members and would love to help people who are interested in using the public drug adverse event API. It's good to note that we've also released all of the source code behind the platform (https://github.com/fda) and are actively interested in having members of the community help us make improvements.
Please do ping me if you have any questions about the API or want to learn more! sean.herron@fda.hhs.gov
Also, here's a direct link to the API documentation: https://open.fda.gov/drug/event
Re: FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data
#6This is awesome. Adding to the list of US Federal APIs - http://18f.github.io/API-All-the-X/pages/status
Re: FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data
#7Great to see this on HN! I'm one of the openFDA core team members and would love to help people who are interested in using the public drug adverse event API. It's good to note that we've also released all of the source code behind the platform ( https://github.com/fda ) and are actively interested in having members of the community help us make improvements. Please do ping me if you have any questions about the API…
The post mentions that "The FDA will continually work to identify additional public datasets to make available through openFDA" - do you guys already have an idea on what datasets are coming next?
Re: FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data
#8Great to see this on HN! I'm one of the openFDA core team members and would love to help people who are interested in using the public drug adverse event API. It's good to note that we've also released all of the source code behind the platform ( https://github.com/fda ) and are actively interested in having members of the community help us make improvements. Please do ping me if you have any questions about the API…
I'm sure a lot of people, myself included, feel that government projects would be better and cheaper if they were developed as open source rather the the typical proprietary solutions developed by contractors that we see today.
What's your take on government and open source projects like this one?
Re: FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data
#9Great to see this on HN! I'm one of the openFDA core team members and would love to help people who are interested in using the public drug adverse event API. It's good to note that we've also released all of the source code behind the platform ( https://github.com/fda ) and are actively interested in having members of the community help us make improvements. Please do ping me if you have any questions about the API…
I'm sure a lot of people, myself included, feel that government projects would be better and cheaper if they were developed as open source rather the the typical proprietary solutions developed by contractors that we see today. What's your take on government and open source projects like this one?
Completely agree. We built openFDA from the beginning with the mindset that everything we produce will be open source. Our hope is that users of openFDA can help us make the API more efficient, return better data (we do a lot of cleanup), and independently verify our methodology.
Beyond improving our own site, it would be absolutely fantastic if someone took openFDA and spun up their own copy. That could be another government agency using it to serve up different data, an external group mirroring openFDA in case of government shutdown or other issue, or a company that uses our code to build something innovative.
I know that sentiment is shared among a lot of agencies right now. In particular, 18F (https://18f.gsa.gov) is a new digital services delivery unit that is looking to do this at a huge scale across the federal government.
Re: FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data
#10Great to see this on HN! I'm one of the openFDA core team members and would love to help people who are interested in using the public drug adverse event API. It's good to note that we've also released all of the source code behind the platform ( https://github.com/fda ) and are actively interested in having members of the community help us make improvements. Please do ping me if you have any questions about the API…
I'm sure a lot of people, myself included, feel that government projects would be better and cheaper if they were developed as open source rather the the typical proprietary solutions developed by contractors that we see today. What's your take on government and open source projects like this one?
The current state of federal IT contracting is so horrendous, that it is worth trying something if it has a 50% chance of failure, but how much harder is it to get contractors to work on a project if your contract mandates that it be open source or Free Software?
seanherron, do you work for a contractor or are you an in-house developer for the FDA or another federal agency?