You can tell a lot about people by what they search for on the Internet. While the prospect of sifting through Internet histories sounds invasive, some people who work with big data have noble intentions to use analysis of Internet searches for healthcare analysis purposes. Officials at the Food and Drug Administration are talking with Google about using the company’s search technology to identify the side effects of drugs that it might not already know about, according to Bloomberg News.
The FDA already tracks these problematic side effects, also called adverse events. But the agency only knows about the adverse events that are reported and collected in a database, explains Regulatory Focus. Reports of adverse events can come from drug companies, patients, and doctors. But these voluntary reports can be uneven and sporadic.
The FDA hopes studying Internet search data can uncover the symptoms and side effects that people are looking up, Bloomberg explains. This analysis of big data could identify the patterns and common terms associated with side effects and the drugs that may be causing them. It might even identify possible adverse events earlier than they are reported to FDA by physicians and drug companies.
According to a Bloomberg review of FDA documents, the agency spoke with Google officials who wrote a 2013 research paper about using search queries to identify adverse events. But it’s not the first time that the FDA has considered using big data to try to identify adverse events. In 2014, FDA researchers published a letter in Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics making the case that search engine logs could be used to identify adverse events, according to Regulatory Focus. Working with Google makes sense for the FDA because it would mark a major advance over the old system of relying on patients, physicians, and drug companies to report potential problems about medicines.
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