Understanding the benefits and risks of medicine from a patient’s point of view is important to the evaluation of our medicines. We set out to find new ways to tap into the information patients share about their ‘real-world’ experience with our medicines.
Real-time safety data
With the help of digital experts from outside GSK, we began to analyse publicly available internet posts, filtering out unrelated information and anything that would identify individuals to GSK.
In a 2-year period, we found approximately 22 million Twitter and Facebook posts discussing potential adverse events for 1,000 medicines. Compare this figure to the 8.6 million adverse event reports received by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) since 1968, and the size of the challenge becomes clear.