The Pros and Cons of Tracking Drug Safety Through Social MediaPosted by Bestow on April 18th, 2014 Pharmacovigilance is a constant process. No matter how thoroughly, safely, and scientifically the clinical trials with drugs have been performed, there may be side effects or interactions that are simply so rare that pharmaceutical companies don't learn about them until a drug enters the market. So it's important to maintain proper Pharmacovigilance systems, and pharmaceutical companies may use social media as part of that strategy. Social Media And Patients Patients of all ages use social media platforms, ranging from online forums and personal blogs to sites such as Facebook and Twitter. In fact, increasingly, patients are turning to social media and their friends, instead of their doctor, both to report symptoms and to attempt to diagnose the problem. Unfortunately, this can be an inaccurate and even dangerous method for the patient. Social Media And Resources There's much in the way of "white noise." Patient concerns and comments are not sorted easily, but buried within the millions of pieces of content posted online every single day, across multiple social networks, blogs, and online forums. This means that monitoring social media will involve an enormous commitment of time and resources. Pharmaceutical companies will need to use complex search algorithms, keyed around multiple terms, and will need to commit at least one member of their team to sorting through this information, which can be a full-time workload in some cases. Monitoring social media can be a costly pharmacovigilance strategy. Social Media Is Often Inaccurate Social media is essentially self-reporting, with all the problems such a method implies. One of the central problems of social media is that it can be difficult to identify the patient and that in most of the cases pharmaceutical companies are essentially relying on the reporter to determine that the medication is the issue. It is unknown whether they took it properly, whether they've consumed illegal substances in addition to their medication or taken the proper dose, or whether they have a prescription or not. And all of this assumes that they actually have taken the medication in the first place, and are not simply lying or exaggerating for some reason. The uncertainty of this data is something that must be considered; Social Media Is Used Differently By Different Groups Another factor is that different demographics will use social media in sometimes drastically different ways. Older people, for example, may not post much that they consider private, while younger demographics will post anything they think their friends might be interested in. How useful social media will be in monitoring Pharmacovigilance for a particular drug will depend heavily on knowing who the customers are and how they use social media. In summation, there can be value for pharmaceutical companies in tracking drug safety through social media but that has to be weighed carefully against the cost implications and the flaws in the data that may be obtained. Like it? Share it!More by this author |