About Us
Druginformer began in an academic research environment as a joint project between the Information Science Department and School of Pharmacology at the University of Utah. Aculus (www.aculus.com), soon became involved with the project, contributing resources to develop algorithms, extract data, and build applications. Druginformer is actively seeking partners to promote further project expansion. If you represent an interested party, please feel free to contact us at , or review our contact page for additional contact details. Similarly, please contact us if you have additional data needs that are not adequately addressed in our existing reports.
What is an Adverse Event?
An adverse drug event (ADE) is any harm associated with the use of a drug. According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, ADEs cause more than 100,000 deaths each year in the U.S. and seriously injure another 2 million making them the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S.
What we do?
Druginformer offers a wide range of information services for curious consumers and healthcare professionals alike. The primary focus of Druginformer is gathering information on adverse events that have been reported in disparate online venues (facebook, twitter, user review sites, forum discussions) and bringing them into a single, organized data structure. Part of the organization process includes parsing each extracted comment to identify and index drugs and adverse events discussed in the text. Druginformer uses advanced machine learning algorithms, an extensive manually labeled corpus, and custom-built classification models in order to correctly identify which posts contain genuine, first hand experienced, adverse event reports. In order to validate our social media extractions, and for the convenience of researchers using our reports, the adverse event reports found in our social media extractions have been correlated with the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) run by the FDA. All adverse event reports filed by doctors and pharmaceutical companies should be contained in FAERS. We believe that the information we have provided is useful to medication users, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, insurance agencies and other groups trying to evaluate drug safety and perform other adverse event related analysis.