FDA opens health and medical data to society

Big data is considered an important resource to change the future health and healthcare landscape. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has begun to gradually open up large medical and health data to society.

June 2 local time, the FDA's public Data Open Project OPENFDA (open.fda.gov) officially online. Its pilot project opened the data on "3 million adverse drug reaction reports". The data were submitted to FDA in 2004-2013 for adverse drug playback and medical negligence records.

These data are available but difficult to apply before the OPENFDA project. OPENFDA provides open application interfaces (APIs), raw data downloads, technical documents and application instances, and even a developer community for important public data sets.

Large health and medical data are often pooled into government regulators (such as the FDA) or government-controlled institutions and infrastructure (such as Medicare and databases). The openness of these data is critical to the health of data and the development of the healthcare industry.

The FDA's opening of its data to the public is based on executive orders from the U.S. President and the U.S. Department of Health's data-opening program. The OPENFDA project allows search between technical experts, mobile application developers, Web developers, and data visualization artists to access and invoke public data in the FDA database.

"Software developers can develop tools to help deliver health and safety information, insight into the meaning of data, and provide information to users and medical professionals in a timely manner," said Tahakass-hout, FDA's chief health information officer, "OPENFDA provides a scale platform Many FDA-specific datasets can be easily searched and consulted, and can be easily adapted for different purposes. This provides a new solution to the search and analysis of public data.

In China, health and healthcare-related data are almost entirely in the hands of government administrations and institutions, but they are not open to the public. Public data often become "sensitive information" and private property of the executive branch.

If this persists, the development of China's health and medical data industry will lag far behind those with open public data because of the blockade of public data.

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)