Show HN: See drug side effects reported to the FDA by people like you. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: See drug side effects reported to the FDA by people like you.

4 pointsmmx5 comments

Hi everyone, We've been building this for a little over a year now and we're interested in getting some feedback. To explain where this data comes from, one of the primary ways that the United States Food and Drug Administration monitors the safety of marketed drugs is the collection and analysis of reported adverse events (Side Effects) through the Adverse Events Reporting System. DrugCite has created a more friendly interface to help sort and explore this data for both doctors and consumers.

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This can be something amazing, but it has to be certified as reliable to be accepted mainstream. People will mistrust something like this until they are certain they can rely on it. Consider Wikipedia even five years ago, if you'd cite it no one would take you seriously, now its considered the #1 place to go. I'd love to be able to recommend this, I wish you best of luck with this!

This is a valid point. I think a couple of things will help resolve this: 1.) time on market, and 2.) letting the public know our credentials. I can assure you the backers of this project are qualified, but we're currently getting some legal issues squared away before we expose who we are. Also, when ads, or overt profiteering, is involved, this can cause issues with credibility as well. We're trying very hard to project ourselves as completely unbiased.

But I think with any project, especially one as sensitive as patient drug safety, time on market and the credibility of the individuals involved is key. We do have a medical doctor with FDA experience who advises DrugCite and has played a key role in the development phase. Honestly I know quite a bit about the other companies in this space, and we're really the only one where all of the players have worked in the medical informatics field for more than a decade each, and has an ex-FDA medical doctor advising the project. Once we post full disclosure on the site, hopefully this will help resolve some of the concerns you've raised. Thanks for the insight; I do hope we end up following Wikipedia's lead on this. And hopefully you'll feel comfortable recommending us in the future ;) Thanks again.

Here's an actual link: http://www.drugcite.com/

Ok, I get the purpose here, and it's a nice layout, but how do you plan to monetize this, or do you plan to?

The members of our group all work day jobs doing medical informatics, so we're more or less medical data geeks who identified a hole in the medical informatics field and exploited it. I do it for it fun, although I can't speak for the other guys in the group. I'm the main programmer so I get a certain amount of enjoyment watching our traffic grow. Even though we're not monetizing our traffic (ads, etc.), there is a sense of satisfaction we get knowing we're empowering consumers, providing a research tool for pharma companies, providing actionable data to physicians, and generally taking obscure messy data and making it clean and usable. This project is very satisfying. Right now we're just happy knowing other people find it useful.

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