Utility of social media and crowd-intelligence data for pharmacovigilance: a scoping review

Each year, thousands of people die from an adverse drug reaction, defined as an undesirable health effect that occurs when medication is used as prescribed. Adverse drug reactions can vary from a simple rash to more severe effects, such as heart failure, acute liver injury, arrhythmias, and even death. These events have a significant impact on both patients and the health care system in terms of cost and health service utilization (for example frequent visits to physicians and emergency departments, hospitalizations). Post-marketing adverse drug reaction surveillance in most countries is suboptimal and consists largely of spontaneous reporting. As this is a rapidly evolving field, we conducted a comprehensive scoping review to assess the utility of social media data for detecting adverse events related to health products, including pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and natural health products. Tricco AC et al. (2018) Utility of social media and crowd-intelligence data for pharmacovigilance: a scoping review. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 18: 38. doi: 10.1186/s12911-018-0621-y. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Sections of the Background, Discussion, and Conclusion are presented in the Podcast. Access the full-text article here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6001022/