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Social Media & Safety Without Borders
Mobile apps and social media are within everyone’s reach, no matter your age or where you’re from. Their potential for good and for harm were explored at length in the DIA EuroMeeting 2017 panel discussion Mobile Technologies and Social Media Analytics for Safety Monitoring and Communication.
“Social media is immediate and direct” when it comes to patient responses, explained Marilyn Metcalf (Head, Centre of Innovation, GlaxoSmithKline). It’s big, too: Over a two-year period, 22 million Twitter and Facebook posts were observed discussing potential adverse events for approximately 1,000 drugs.
Do patients have a duty to report an adverse event? If so, is social media their best vehicle? Is it feasible for signal management experts to monitor social media? If so, should this process be regulated? Are there ethical implications? For the most part, these questions remain unanswered.
While collecting real-time safety data and real-time benefits are two of the most important arguments for using social media to collect medicinal product information, social media gives health care providers other important information such as a medicine’s action time, the effect duration, comparisons between products, even complaints about package and formulation. Responding to individual posters, to provide proper instructions or additional guidance, is another current industry hurdle to more fully embracing social media.
However, implementing a mobile app to report adverse events has proven to be quite useful for signal management experts in pharmacovigilance. The Web RADR (Recognising Adverse Drug Reactions) research project, which collects adverse effects from patients, has led to policy recommendations on how and when to use social media data in the context of Good Vigilance Practices recommendations and requirements. Social media is continuously evolving, and this fluidity can affect data quality, but it can support risk management plans or risk minimization measures as a data source for confirming signals. Speakers pointed out that there is a very big difference between open and closed social networks, which can be seen in their respective data quality.
Globally, the World Health Organization has focused on improving pharmacovigilance and drug safety on the African continent with the help of “Pharmacovigilance without borders.” Even with tailored pharmacovigilance programs for HIV, malaria and tuberculosis, spontaneous reports cannot cover all the safety needs. Negotiated through the UK’s MHRA, the Web RADR project is available for Burkina Faso and Zambia to report side effects.
Social media continues to evolve and remains an easy tool to receive information. But genuine two-way communication, and regulatory implications, still present formidable challenges.
This article originally appeared in the July 2017 Global Forum.