FDA Launches openFDA, Paving The Road To Innovation For Food Producers
By Isaac Fletcher, contributing writer, Food Online
The initiative will give various users the opportunity to work with large datasets to build tools, applications, and methods to signal safety information, derive insights, and get information where it needs to go
On June 2, the FDA launched openFDA, a new initiative designed to make it easier and more convenient for web developers, researchers, and the public to access large public health datasets collected by the agency. In accordance with the recent Presidential Executive Order on Open Data, along with the Department of Health and Human Service’s Health Data Initiative, openFDA will make the FDA’s publicly available data accessible in a structured, computer readable format. This will make it possible for technology specialists, web developers, data visualization artists, and researchers to quickly search and pull information from massive data sets on an as-needed basis.
OpenFDA functions via the use of a search-based application program interface (API) to collect large amounts of existing, publicly-available data. This offers developers the ability to search through text within the data, which ranks results similar to the way a Google search would. From there, developers can build their own applications on top of openFDA with the flexibility to determine what kinds of data they would like to search and how that data should be presented to the end-user. In short, a wide variety of applications can be built on a single common platform.
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The initiative is the result of extensive research efforts by internal officials and external developers to identify datasets that are in demand and traditionally difficult to use. The FDA has decided to phase in openFDA with an initial pilot program that involves the millions of reports of drug adverse events and medication errors that have been submitted to the FDA between 2004 and 2013. The data, which was previously only available through difficult-to-use reports or Freedom of Information Act requests, was made available through openFDA, but with the exclusion of any information that could potentially be used to identify individuals. The pilot program will be expanded to include other FDA databases on product recalls and product labeling.
Walter Harris, the FDA’s chief operating officer and acting chief information officer, explains, “The openFDA initiative leverages new technologies and methods to unlock tremendous public data and resources available from the FDA in a user-friendly way. OpenFDA is a valuable resource that will help those in the private and public sectors use FDA public data to spur innovation, advance academic research, educate the public, and protect public health.”
When explaining the possible benefits and innovations that could result from openFDA, Taha Kass-Hout, M.D., the FDA’s chief health informatics officer, says, “Through this new and novel approach to data organization, these reports will be available in their entirety so that software developers can build tools to help signal potential safety information, derive meaningful insights, and get information to consumers and healthcare professionals in a timely manner. OpenFDA offers a scalable platform that can be easily searched and queried across many distinct datasets, and can be easily redeployed or altered to fit a variety of purposes, and provides an innovative public data search and analytics solution.”