title: Bridging islands of information to establish an integrated knowledge base of drugs and health outcomes of interest.
abstract: The entire drug safety enterprise has a need to search, retrieve, evaluate, and synthesize scientific evidence more efficiently. This discovery and synthesis process would be greatly accelerated through access to a common framework that brings all relevant information sources together within a standardized structure. This presents an opportunity to establish an open-source community effort to develop a global knowledge base, one that brings together and standardizes all available information for all drugs and all health outcomes of interest (HOIs) from all electronic sources pertinent to drug safety. To make this vision a reality, we have established a workgroup within the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI, http://ohdsi.org) collaborative. The workgroup's mission is to develop an open-source standardized knowledge base for the effects of medical products and an efficient procedure for maintaining and expanding it. The knowledge base will make it simpler for practitioners to access, retrieve, and synthesize evidence so that they can reach a rigorous and accurate assessment of causal relationships between a given drug and HOI. Development of the knowledge base will proceed with the measureable goal of supporting an efficient and thorough evidence-based assessment of the effects of 1,000 active ingredients across 100 HOIs. This non-trivial task will result in a high-quality and generally applicable drug safety knowledge base. It will also yield a reference standard of drug-HOI pairs that will enable more advanced methodological research that empirically evaluates the performance of drug safety analysis methods.
authors.affiliation: University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, rdb20@pitt.edu.
authors.forename: Richard D
authors.initials: RD
authors.lastname: Boyce
authors.forename: Patrick B
authors.initials: PB
authors.lastname: Ryan
authors.forename: G Niklas
authors.initials: GN
authors.lastname: Norén
authors.forename: Martijn J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Schuemie
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Reich
authors.forename: Jon
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Duke
authors.forename: Nicholas P
authors.initials: NP
authors.lastname: Tatonetti
authors.forename: Gianluca
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Trifirò
authors.forename: Rave
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Harpaz
authors.forename: J Marc
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Overhage
authors.forename: Abraham G
authors.initials: AG
authors.lastname: Hartzema
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Khayter
authors.forename: Erica A
authors.initials: EA
authors.lastname: Voss
authors.forename: Christophe G
authors.initials: CG
authors.lastname: Lambert
authors.forename: Vojtech
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Huser
authors.forename: Michel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dumontier
mesh_terms: D062313:Databases, Pharmaceutical / Q000592:standards*; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D006801:Humans; D012015:Reference Standards