AdverseEvents Launches Innovative Drug Side Effect Reporting System

First accurate, real-time adverse events reporting of all FDA approved medications in a user-friendly, fully searchable online database.

Healdsburg, CA, Sept. 26, 2011—Today during the Medication and Care Management Session at the Health 2.0 Conference, AdverseEvents, Inc. (AEI) Co-founder and President, Brian Overstreet, will announce the launch of the AdverseEvents website—a first-of-its-kind online resource that delivers accurate, real-time information on adverse drug events. Users will now have the ability to quantify and fully understand the scope of safety issues based on accurate rates of side effects by using AEI’s easy-to-use, fully searchable database. AEI’s proprietary data set has applications for both healthcare professionals and patients.

Until today’s launch, there has been limited access to reliable drug side effect information. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS) is the only current database of adverse event information but it is inaccessible, incomplete, filled with misspellings and misclassifications, and often out-of-date. Patients have been left to rely solely on drug labels, which can list hundreds of potential side effects with no insight into the real-world incidence or outcome rates. This lack of information has left patients and healthcare professionals confused, and often misinformed about real-world drug safety risks. 

To solve this major healthcare challenge, AEI has developed RxFilter™, a proprietary 17-step data refinement process that standardizes and normalizes the FDA’s AERS into an accessible, comparative database of all FDA approved medications. It is the only resource that utilizes the RxFilter process to combine all the varied designations for a medication found in AERS into a single report, and standardizes the AERS data for improved accuracy of adverse drug event information. This dramatically improves the search and alert functionality for side effect information, data analysis and outcomes data, and provides the only comparison views of a drug and its side effects. AEI’s data will increase transparency throughout the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. 

With patients taking more prescription medications than ever, this data has never been timelier. During the course of an average month, a reported 48 percent of the U.S. population takes one prescription drug and 21 percent takes three or more. As the reliance on prescription medications has soared, the lack of available information on drug side effects has become even more alarming. “Over 500,000 medication adverse events are reported yearly to the FDA and this is estimated to be only 10 percent of all actual adverse events,” said Overstreet. “Now with AdverseEvents, patients can take more control of their own care, and healthcare professionals can make better decisions on the development, implementation and use of prescription medications. We believe that AEI will radically improve patient safety by decreasing potentially harmful side effects.”

Using AEI’s analytic tools, users can do fast comparison searches on over 4,000 drugs, 1,000 medical conditions and 15,000 drug side effects. Healthcare professionals can conduct in-depth custom searches and create alerts that will provide an unprecedented level of drug safety intelligence. Pharmaceutical companies’ analysis of AEI’s data will inform medication development strategies, insurance companies will track medication trends and outcomes, and physicians will make better clinical decisions for their patients.

In an industry where sales are projected to reach $1.1 trillion by 2014, AEI offers the only resource that can accurately measure FDA approved medication side effects and ensure high quality standards to protect patient safety. The power of AEI’s data can be seen in recently released AdverseEvents Monitor Reports that highlight the need for reclassification of certain Epilepsy drugs for pregnant women and the examination of bisphosphonate drugs used to treat Osteoporosis. These reports can be viewed atwww.adverseevents.com/news.php.