FDA launches openFDA

The FDA launches openFDA - an open interface designed to make it easier to access large, public health datasets collected by the agency. (You can find an example of a report generated by this interface here).

While having publicly available datasets of adverse events is always a good idea, one need also to think about the known issues of under-reporting in healthcare. There are many good reasons why the healthcare system suffers from under-reporting, and when we analyse this data we always have to ask ourselves - what can we learn from the tip of the iceberg.