Walter Eisner • Fri, June 20th, 2014
The FDA’s collective heads are in the clouds when it comes to “Big Data.” And the agency wants you to get on their cloud.
openFDA
On June 2, 2014, the agency launched openFDA, a system designed to make it easier for web developers, researchers, and the public to access and use health data sets collected by the agency.
For example, over 3 million reports of drug adverse reactions or medication errors have been submitted to the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) since 2004. But obtaining that information hasn’t been easy. Companies send hundreds of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the FDA every year to get the data. Other methods required downloading large amounts of files encoded in a variety of formats that were slow and labor intensive.
This year alone, the FDA expects to receive somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million submissions through its eSubmission Gateway—and some submissions can now be as large as a terabyte (one trillion bytes) in size. This is the very definition of a big data.
