Not all the news out of government is bad.
Consider openFDA which is putting
More than 3 million adverse drug event reports at your fingertips.
From the “about” page:
OpenFDA is an exciting new initiative in the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Informatics and Technology Innovation spearheaded by FDA’s Chief Health Informatics Officer. OpenFDA offers easy access to FDA public data and highlight projects using these data in both the public and private sector to further regulatory or scientific missions, educate the public, and save lives.
What does it do?
OpenFDA provides API and raw download access to a number of high-value structured datasets. The platform is currently in public beta with one featured dataset, FDA’s publically available drug adverse event reports.
In the future, openFDA will provide a platform for public challenges issued by the FDA and a place for the community to interact with each other and FDA domain experts with the goal of spurring innovation around FDA data.
We’re currently focused on working on datasets in the following areas:
- Adverse Events: FDA’s publically available drug adverse event reports, a database that contains millions of adverse event and medication error reports submitted to FDA covering all regulated drugs.
- Recalls (coming soon): Enforcement Report and Product Recalls Data, containing information gathered from public notices about certain recalls of FDA-regulated products
- Documentation (coming soon): Structured Product Labeling Data, containing detailed product label information on many FDA-regulated product
We’ll be releasing a number of updates and additional datasets throughout the upcoming months.
OK, I’m Twitter follower #522 @openFDA.
What’s your @openFDA number?
A good experience, i.e., people making good use of released data, asking for more data, etc., is what will drive more open data. Make every useful government data project count.