Analyzing Search Behavior of Healthcare Professionals for Drug Safety Surveillance

Abstract

Post-market drug safety surveillance is hugely important and is a significant challenge despite the existence of adverse event (AE) reporting systems. Here we describe a preliminary analysis of search logs from healthcare professionals as a source for detecting adverse drug events. We annotate search log query terms with biomedical terminologies for drugs and events, and then perform a statistical analysis to identify associations among drugs and events within search sessions. We evaluate our approach using two different types of reference standards consisting of known adverse drug events (ADEs) and negative controls. Our approach achieves a discrimination accuracy of 0.85 in terms of the area under the receiver operator curve (AUC) for the reference set of well-established ADEs and an AUC of 0.68 for the reference set of recently labeled ADEs. We also find that the majority of associations in the reference sets have support in the search log data. Despite these promising results additional research is required to better understand users' search behavior, biasing factors, and the overall utility of analyzing healthcare professional search logs for drug safety surveillance.

Analyzing Information Seeking and Drug-Safety Alert Response by Health Care Professionals as New Methods for Surveillance

“…A second study demonstrated that combining data from the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) with consumer search logs improved accuracy of adverse drug event detection by 19%, compared with using either source alone [ 16 ]. Our findings in this work and in a recent preliminary study [ 33 ] indicate that incorporating search logs of health care professionals for pharmacovigilance is a promising approach.…”

A curated and standardized adverse drug event resource to accelerate drug safety research

“…Pharmacovigilance refers to the science relating to the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse effects or any other drug-related problem. The Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) defines a safety signal as ‘information that arises from one or multiple sources (including observations or experiments), which suggests a new, potentially causal association, or a new aspect of a known association between an intervention [e.g., administration of a medicine] and an event or set of related events, either adverse or beneficial, that is judged to be of sufficient likelihood to justify verificatory action.’ Efficient and reliable identification and evaluation of ‘safety signals’ requires access to evidence from disparate sources, including electronic health records 3–6 , spontaneous reporting systems (SRS) 7–9 , social media 10–14 , literature mining 15–18 , web search queries via search engine logs 19–22 , and biological and chemical knowledge bases 23–25 . The belief is that each data source provides a unique vantage point in understanding a drug’s safety profile.…”

The consequences of drug misuse on post-marketing surveillance

“…The use of social media/web data for ADR monitoring, including assessment of search logs from healthcare professionals [22], is receiving increasing levels of attention [23]. The amount of user-generated data on social media and other Internet-based venues provides the possibility to systematically mine, aggregate, and analyze textual/unstructured data (e.g.…”