Great 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 (<a href="https://github.com/fda" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fda</a>) and are actively interested in having members of the community help us make improvements.<p>Please do ping me if you have any questions about the API or want to learn more! sean.herron@fda.hhs.gov<p>Also, here's a direct link to the API documentation: <a href="https://open.fda.gov/drug/event" rel="nofollow">https://open.fda.gov/drug/event</a>
Hey 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:
<a href="http://www.drugcite.com/?q=ABILIFY" rel="nofollow">http://www.drugcite.com/?q=ABILIFY</a>
FDA Drug Page
<a href="http://open.fda.gov/drug/event/" rel="nofollow">http://open.fda.gov/drug/event/</a><p>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.
It's really encouraging to see that there's someone in the U.S. gov't who not only cares about open source and the associated effects of transparency, but has some practical experience* in it.<p>The openFDA website is built on Jekyll (<a href="https://github.com/FDA/open.fda.gov" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/FDA/open.fda.gov</a>) and its API is powered with Python and Node.js (<a href="https://github.com/FDA/openfda" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/FDA/openfda</a>)...It's not just the framework/current-tooling that is nice, but that such systems use open, readable formats (such as Markdown for the web pages).<p>The current administration has always paid lip-service toward open-source...they won't satisfy people who think "open source" and "government" means hand over just about everything...but they're doing a good job making inroads on the parts of the U.S. data interfaces that were well-intended, but so obfuscated by poor design that it was a job in itself to parse/scrape their sites.<p>(FDA has always had really exhaustive dumps of their data...strewn about their legacy site...the API isn't as interesting to me as the documentation for the API and the pipeline of data)<p>* I don't want to just slag on Drupal...but Drupal was what Obama's head tech officer wanted in place, and to their credit, they did open-source parts of their custom Drupal modules...which were not particularly useful, because of the particulars of Drupal's module system and its quickly changing API...nevermind being only useful for other Drupal installations. But a lot of credit has to go to the U.S. gov't for pivoting off of Drupal to a mix of WordPress, Jekyll, and even node.js sites with less coupled components. It's been only about two or so years since Data.gov open-sourced its Drupal components before promptly switching to WordPress and CKAN modules...considering how a non-significant number of the fed sites are built on 12+ year-old code...the turnaround in the U.S. gov's stack is pretty amazing...(when it's not attempted on a service-critical site, such as healthcare.gov)
If you're interested in this, you should also check out the UMLS published by the National Institutes of Health.<p><a href="https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/</a><p>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.<p>I've been very impressed with it and I feel like not enough people have heard of it.
I have some history working with the Adverse Event Reporting data. The API is nice, but it just exposes what they already offer in flat files .... stale data. Does it seem reasonable to you that the FDA runs a year behind on this data?<p><a href="http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/Surveillance/AdverseDrugEffects/ucm082193.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInforma...</a><p>They don't respond: <a href="https://twitter.com/statwonk/status/413355130461761536" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/statwonk/status/413355130461761536</a>
This is awesome. Adding to the list of US Federal APIs - <a href="http://18f.github.io/API-All-the-X/pages/status" rel="nofollow">http://18f.github.io/API-All-the-X/pages/status</a>
My colleague and I have developed a search interface for web browsers at <a href="http://openfdasearch.herokuapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://openfdasearch.herokuapp.com/</a><p>Feel free to tweet at us at @SocialHealthIs, @Geek_Nurse, and/or @Skram
Awesome initiative! As I was testing it, I noticed that the response consists of prettified JSON. I'm guessing that all that whitespace can be removed to save bandwidth?
I hope the NSA will do the same and also open their datasets... maybe someone could catch someone who plans some "terroristic" actions before they happen...