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From Big Data to Smart Data for Pharmacovigilance: The Role of Healthcare Databases and Other Emerging Sources

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Abstract

In the last decade ‘big data’ has become a buzzword used in several industrial sectors, including but not limited to telephony, finance and healthcare. Despite its popularity, it is not always clear what big data refers to exactly. Big data has become a very popular topic in healthcare, where the term primarily refers to the vast and growing volumes of computerized medical information available in the form of electronic health records, administrative or health claims data, disease and drug monitoring registries and so on. This kind of data is generally collected routinely during administrative processes and clinical practice by different healthcare professionals: from doctors recording their patients’ medical history, drug prescriptions or medical claims to pharmacists registering dispensed prescriptions. For a long time, this data accumulated without its value being fully recognized and leveraged. Today big data has an important place in healthcare, including in pharmacovigilance. The expanding role of big data in pharmacovigilance includes signal detection, substantiation and validation of drug or vaccine safety signals, and increasingly new sources of information such as social media are also being considered. The aim of the present paper is to discuss the uses of big data for drug safety post-marketing assessment.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biomedical and Dental Sciences and Morpho-Functional Imaging, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

    Gianluca Trifirò & Janet Sultana

  2. Department of Medical Informatics, Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Gianluca Trifirò & Janet Sultana

  3. Epidemiology Group Lead, Analytics, Worldwide Safety, Pfizer, Tadworth, UK

    Andrew Bate

  4. Department of Clinical Pharmacology, New York University (NYU), New York, USA

    Andrew Bate

Authors
  1. Gianluca Trifirò
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gianluca Trifirò.

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Funding

No sources of funding were used to assist in the preparation of this study.

Conflict of interest

Janet Sultana has no conflicts of interest that are directly related to the contents of this study. Andrew Bate has no conflicts of interest that are directly related to the contents of this study. He is a full-time employee of Pfizer and holds stock and stock-options with Pfizer. Gianluca Trifirò has no conflicts of interest that are directly related to the contents of this study. He is the scientific coordinator of a Master’s degree course which has received unconditional funding from Celgene, Amgen, ABC International Pharma, Shire Pharmaceuticals, Mediolanum Pharmaceuticals, Hospira, Allergan, MSD, Astrazeneca, Roche, Alfa Wassermann, Otsuka, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Daiichi Pharmaceuticals.

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Trifirò, G., Sultana, J. & Bate, A. From Big Data to Smart Data for Pharmacovigilance: The Role of Healthcare Databases and Other Emerging Sources. Drug Saf 41, 143–149 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40264-017-0592-4

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