

Show HN: See drug side effects reported to the FDA by people like you. - mmx

Hi everyone, We've been building this for a little over a year now and we're interested in getting some feedback. To explain where this data comes from, one of the primary ways that the United States Food and Drug Administration monitors the safety of marketed drugs is the collection and analysis of reported adverse events (Side Effects) through the Adverse Events Reporting System. DrugCite has created a more friendly interface to help sort and explore this data for both doctors and consumers.
======
JeffreyLi
This can be something amazing, but it has to be certified as reliable to be
accepted mainstream. People will mistrust something like this until they are
certain they can rely on it. Consider Wikipedia even five years ago, if you'd
cite it no one would take you seriously, now its considered the #1 place to
go. I'd love to be able to recommend this, I wish you best of luck with this!

~~~
mmx
This is a valid point. I think a couple of things will help resolve this: 1.)
time on market, and 2.) letting the public know our credentials. I can assure
you the backers of this project are qualified, but we're currently getting
some legal issues squared away before we expose who we are. Also, when ads, or
overt profiteering, is involved, this can cause issues with credibility as
well. We're trying very hard to project ourselves as completely unbiased.

But I think with any project, especially one as sensitive as patient drug
safety, time on market and the credibility of the individuals involved is key.
We do have a medical doctor with FDA experience who advises DrugCite and has
played a key role in the development phase. Honestly I know quite a bit about
the other companies in this space, and we're really the only one where all of
the players have worked in the medical informatics field for more than a
decade each, and has an ex-FDA medical doctor advising the project. Once we
post full disclosure on the site, hopefully this will help resolve some of the
concerns you've raised. Thanks for the insight; I do hope we end up following
Wikipedia's lead on this. And hopefully you'll feel comfortable recommending
us in the future ;) Thanks again.

------
mmx
Here's an actual link: <http://www.drugcite.com/>

~~~
murdan
Ok, I get the purpose here, and it's a nice layout, but how do you plan to
monetize this, or do you plan to?

~~~
mmx
The members of our group all work day jobs doing medical informatics, so we're
more or less medical data geeks who identified a hole in the medical
informatics field and exploited it. I do it for it fun, although I can't speak
for the other guys in the group. I'm the main programmer so I get a certain
amount of enjoyment watching our traffic grow. Even though we're not
monetizing our traffic (ads, etc.), there is a sense of satisfaction we get
knowing we're empowering consumers, providing a research tool for pharma
companies, providing actionable data to physicians, and generally taking
obscure messy data and making it clean and usable. This project is very
satisfying. Right now we're just happy knowing other people find it useful.

