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Data Mining Competition To Improve Drug Safety
An anonymous reader writes "The OMOP Cup is a competition to find new methods for detecting drug side effects. There have been several cases over the last few years where drugs have had issues that haven't been detected for years after they were released. The proliferation of electronic medical records and pharmacy claims provides a large and potentially powerful new data source for faster detection. The problem is that the techniques for doing this on a large scale are immature. The OMOP Cup is trying to help fix that. They've already given out $5,000 for top methods, and there's $15,000 still up for grabs."
You parse 16 gigs, and what do you get?...
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
Datamining by Kaiser Permanente helped find a previously unknown risk of heart attack for certain users of VIOXX, and it was probably right that the drug was withdrawn. It may also be a good idea to re-approve it for those who would benefit with minimal risk. But without the post-approval datamining we would never know what the risk/benefit truly was.
That also points to some limitations of our drug approval process. Trial patients are followed only for so long. In fact, some of the trial patients who were taking it long term had heart attacks, but that data was not included because they occurred past the end of the required study period.
If you believe in the science that brings you modern medicine to begin with, then more knowledge is always better.