Using social media in safety signal management: is it reliable?

Social media use is growing globally, with a reported 3 billion active users in 2017. This medium is used increasingly in a health setting by patients (and to a limited extent, healthcare professionals) to share experiences and ask advice on medical conditions as well as pharmaceutical products. In...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Veröffentlicht in:Therapeutic Advances in Drug Safety 2018-10, Vol.9 (10), p.591-599
Hauptverfasser: Rees, Sue, Mian, Sadiqa, Grabowski, Neal
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:Volltext bestellen
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:Social media use is growing globally, with a reported 3 billion active users in 2017. This medium is used increasingly in a health setting by patients (and to a limited extent, healthcare professionals) to share experiences and ask advice on medical conditions as well as pharmaceutical products. In recent years, attention has turned to this huge, generally untapped, source of potential health information as a possible tool for pharmacovigilance, and in particular signal detection. In this article we explore some of the challenges of utilizing social media for safety signal detection and look at some of the pilot studies conducted to date in order to weigh the evidence for and against the utility of social media data in safety signal detection. After doing so we can conclude that the analysis of social media datasets has demonstrated a limited contribution to the signal detection and signal management process. The data available in social media can complement blind spots in traditional pharmacovigilance datasets and provide significant value for targeted investigations and studies such as those relating to abuse, misuse, use in pregnancy, and patient sentiments.
ISSN:2042-0986
2042-0994
DOI:10.1177/2042098618789596