$70,000 at Stake in the “Reporting Safety Events Challenge”

How serious is the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) about increasing patient safety?   So serious that they are running a contest challenging the best and brightest developers to create a platform that makes it easier to report a patient safety event electronically.

Learn More About the "Reporting Safety Events Challenge" for Developers Here

The Reporting Patient Safety Events Challenge is offering $70,000 worth of prizes, with $50,000 (and a demo opportunity) awarded to the first place winner, $15,000 to the second place winner and $5,000 to third place winner.  The submission deadline is August 31, 2012.  Learn more about the contest guidelines and 30+ participating developer teams here.

“Ideally, we would live in a world of optimal care delivery,” says the ONC.  “Physicians, nurses and care delivery organizations across the country are continuously working to minimize and eliminate errors.  But, until this ideal world exists, we need to invest in infrastructure that helps enable better care quality, risk management and shared learning – all to ensure better care for patients.”

PatientsLikeMe fully supports this goal, which is why we introduced our first-of-its-kind adverse event reporting platform in 2009.  As part of a two-year pilot program, our members with multiple sclerosis (MS) were able to submit adverse events related to a medication, medical product or medical device directly to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s MedWatch program through PatientsLikeMe.  Our system automatically pulled relevant data from the patient’s profile into a FDA 3500 form, dramatically reducing completion time.

Since then, we’ve also developed an integrated and comprehensive drug safety reporting platform that monitors patient data for potential adverse events when we are collaborating with a sponsoring partner in designated disease areas. These data are then clinically triaged and curated using the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA), an industry standard terminology. Adverse events are submitted to our partners electronically in FDA 3500A format to meet regulatory timelines and reporting criteria.  Of note, PatientsLikeMe is the only online health data platform in social media that has successfully passed multiple drug safety audits conducted by our partners’ pharmacovigilance and drug safety experts.

What’s the difference between patient safety and drug safety?  And what do we see ahead in this critical area of healthcare?  Tune in to a podcast with PatientsLikeMe Chairman and Co-Founder Jamie Heywood on this very topic.

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