A study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that people who take at least one of the 200 drugs that list depression as a side-effect are, in fact, more likely to be depressed. The study, which included 26,192 adults who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, does not prove a causal effect, but the association is striking. 

Modern pharmacovigilance departments today do more than process and review ISCRs. They are involved in the entire lifecycle of a drug, providing vital data points and analysis that inform everything from clinical trial design to commercial planning to post-market safety surveillance. In order to perform well, pharmacovigilance and safety science teams require access to an array of data and the analytics to make sense of those data. The insights gained from unique combinations of clinical and real world data drive signal detection, epidemiological research, and evidence generation, all of which support organization-wide decisions.

The problem is that drug safety insights are hard to obtain and teams often get caught in a "paralysis by analysis" trap.

Wow, it’s the end of February. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels that the first two months of 2018 have flown by. Advera Health’s engineering, product, and analyst teams have been hard at work. Evidex’s back-end data architecture has been enhanced to keep up with our growing library of datasets and to ensure the analytics layered on all of the data are efficient and fast to meet client demands.

It is now well established that the rapid expansions of the internet and computing power have opened up the use of social media and Internet forums for pharmacovigilance. These sources contain untapped, albeit noisy, safety and benefit information. As noted in Social Media Listening for Routine Post-Marketing Safety Surveillance, published in the journal Drug Safety, methods exist to reduce noise and make the data suitable for post-marketing safety surveillance. However, the use of these data to date have been constrained by limitations in how to best implement novel methods without disrupting traditional signal detection management and evaluation work flow.

We have a tradition in the RxView blog of starting each new year by asking if the year ahead will be “The Year of Drug Safety” or “The Year of Healthcare Technology”. We typically lay out a few thoughts on why the year ahead has the potential to be a big year.

This year feels different. Maybe it’s the incredible bull market that has inflated our confidence or the fact that my colleague Jim Davis feels that it is a foregone conclusion that the Philadelphia Eagles will finally win the Super Bowl (sorry Jim, that’s ridiculous!). Or perhaps it’s the fact that our client roster keeps growing, Evidex keeps getting more valuable to our users every day, and key industry opinion leaders are confirming that our vision is THE path forward. Whatever the reason, I’m willing to be a bit bolder this year.

2018 WILL BE the year that the pharmacovigilance industry embraces the next generation of drug safety data, analytics, and software; What we call Pharmacovigilance 2.0.

Happy Holidays! In what many describe as the most exciting countdown of the year, here are the top free downloads from Advera Health for 2017!

Happy Holidays! As another year comes to a close we share with you our most popular blog posts of 2017. Enjoy!

Recently the FDA published the Q2 2017 version of Potential Signals of Serious Risks / New Safety Information as identified by the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS).

Last week we announced the addition of VigiBase global safety data to the Evidex platform. VigiBase is the unique global database of individual safety reports collected from over 110 countries by the World Health Organization. It totals over 15 million adverse event reports since 1968 and is administered by the Uppsala Monitoring Centre in Sweden.

This is an exciting development for our company, for our clients, and for the drug safety community at large.

Advera Health released a new functionality framework in Evidex this week called Custom Analytics. The goal of Custom Analytics is to provide Evidex users an easy way to perform complex queries across all of the clinical, spontaneous and other real-world data included in the Evidex platform and to return a filtered set of specific information. 

We have launched Custom Analytics with a Custom Drug-Adverse Event Analysis search function. With the Custom Drug-Adverse Event Analysis, users can easily filter case reports by specific drug combinations, demographic, and descriptive information, create customized MedDRA queries with multiple preferred terms, and calculate Reporting Odds Ratios (RORs).

The best part? It's simple to use.

Let's demonstrate the power of Custom Analytics through a case study, analyzing adverse events associated with endothelin receptor antagonists (ERAs) using the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) data.