The idea behind the app version of OpenFDA Search was to make adverse event reports easily accessible to both providers and patients, making it one of the first apps to harness FDA data and reports. 

 

Created by Social Health Insights, the app allows a user to enter search criteria, including a range of dates when the adverse drug event was reported, patient age, country, manufacturer, medication brand name, reaction, pharmacologic class, drug indication and product NDC, or pick and choose from that list, then hit a 'show me the data' button.

 

Doing so queries more than 3.6 million adverse event reports, according to the app. Searching on a specific brand -- say, Tylenol -- returns 468 reports. In one of those, an 83-year old female patient reported "renal failure acute," so adding the word "renal" to the query narrows the list down to 18 reports.

 

[See also: Data floodgates will stay open, says HHS.]

 

For a patient or doctor who knows the specific drug and the reaction it might have caused (and it would follow that they also know the indication the drug is meant to treat), with just those three pieces of information OpenFDA Search makes it easy to determine whether anyone else has had a similar experience -- which is basically what FDA Chief Health Informatics Officer Taha Kass-Hout, MD, was hoping someone would do.

 

"Using this data, a mobile developer could create a search app for a smartphone, for example, which a consumer could then use to determine whether anyone else has experienced the same adverse event they did after taking a certain drug," Kass-Hout wrote in a blog post.

 

It's too early to tell for certain whether OpenFDA Search is technically the very first app to harness the data and reports released by the FDA, but Social Health Insights CTO and Co-Founder Mark Silverberg said it's "the first search interface for the newly released API."

 

Silverberg, in fact, had the app ready to demonstrate at this week's Health Datapalooza, and OpenFDA Search Co-founder Brian Norris noted the current iteration is a beta version, so there may be bugs. He's encouraging testers to contact them if they encounter problems.

 

Since OpenFDA Search is nascent, Norris said the project as of now is a donation for the betterment of humanity -- and he and Silverberg have yet to think through a commercialization strategy.

 

"Our business model is building custom software and offering open data services to organizations wanting to get their data out there successfully," he said. "We see a lot of value in open data like the OpenFDA Adverse Events API, and I am sure we might find ways to commercialize in the future, but for now we are happy to provide the community a simple way to search and graphically see the data."

 

"We also hope through small innovations like this we find great partners who share our innovation mission and can find new ways to leverage data sets like this one."

 

Providing services to healthcare payers and providers just might be the biggest mHealth opportunity, if forecasting by market analysts research2guidance proves true. Indeed, in its latest report, the Berlin-based firm suggested that "the most relevant revenue stream is linked to services which are offered via the apps" predicting that the global market will balloon from $2.4 billion today to $26 billion by 2017. 

 

Editor's note: After we published this story, Social Health Insights re-christened its app ResearchAE.