GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) was recognized as a recipient of the 2015 Bio-IT World Best Practices Award this morning in Boston for its work with Epidemico on Project CRaWL (Contextualizing Real World Drug Use Through Social Listening), a collaborative effort marketed as a strategic solution in post-marketing pharmacovigilance. The enterprise’s overarching goal is to support safe and effective use of GSK medical products by monitoring social media on the Internet to better understand their commodities’ effects.

Traditionally, the safety and effectiveness of medical products are assessed during multiple clinical trials prior to product launch. Unanticipated risks and side effects can arise following a drug’s approval by the FDA, highlighting the importance of post-market surveillance. Post-market surveillance rounds out a product’s safety profile by providing data outside of a controlled clinical trial which conveys the importance of having a robust post-marketing safety surveillance procedure to provide data on patients’ product usage.

Epidemico worked with GSK to refine methods for collecting social media information surrounding adverse events from medical products, allowing safety stakeholders to glean insights from publicly-available information extracted from social media platforms. Project CRaWL further developed and leveraged Epidemico’s MedWatcher Social (MWS) system, an analytics platform designed to support post-marketing surveillance by collecting, aggregating, filtering, and displaying social media posts related to medical products. Using text processing algorithms and natural language processing, MWS automatically identifies possible adverse events described in social media and translates this unique stream of intelligence to contribute to an understanding of a real-world drug use and medical product safety.

http://www.bio-itworld.com/2015/4/22/2015-bio-it-world-best-practices-awards-winners-announced.html