Epidemico

MedWatcher Social

Complementing our crowdsourcing app, we created MedWatcher Social as a social media monitoring and analytics platform. MedWatcher Social is funded by the Office of the Chief Scientist at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and based on HealthMap technology developed at Boston Childrens Hospital of Harvard Medical School. MedWatcher Social identifies, aggregates, classifies and visualizes adverse events for drugs, devices and vaccines. We monitor social media including Facebook, Twitter, news, and online patient communities. Like you, we pay particularly attention to unlabeled and serious adverse events. We focus on having low false positives to allow for follow-up on only the most meaningful associations. MedWatcher Social can be used to support drug safety programs, but it is not a replacement for traditional pharmacovigilance. Adverse events (or adverse drug reactions) detected in social media are MedDRA coded and exported in E2B format for incorporation into safety databases. The system can be programed to automatically alert users when reports reach frequency or statistical thresholds. We minimize false positives with sophisticated algorithms and expert curation. We believe in presenting our methods and results via peer-reviewed scientific publications. While we initially developed this technology for improving the veracity of infectious disease reporting during outbreaks and for neglected tropical diseases, and it has since been extended to monitoring drug adverse events, illegal wildlife trade and other areas. Screenshot below of the dashboard, and demos are available by contacting [email protected].