openFDA and Drug Adverse Events

openFDA launched today and with it the first publicly available dataset—Drug Adverse Reaction and Medication Error Reports—that covers more than 4 million records from 2004 to 2013.

The openFDA team compiled 10 things to help developers use this dataset more effectively, including:

• Interactive examples created by the openFDA team to give perspective to the data. The example scenarios with queries help teach how to perform different types of searches on the data.
• Reference page that gives detailed interpretations of what can be expected from the API call.
• Special openfda section that provides a number of additional data fields, including: Unique Ingredient Identifier, National Drug Code and New Drug Application Number.

Check out the entire openFDA post to see the entire list. The openFDA team will also be adding additional data whenever a new Quarterly Data File is posted.

Sean Herron is a Presidential Innovation Fellow serving at FDA.