From Big Data to Smart Data for Pharmacovigilance: The Role of Healthcare Databases and Other Emerging Sources

In the last decade ‘big data’ has become a buzzword used in several industrial sectors, including but not limited to telephony, finance and healthcare. Despite its popularity, it is not always clear what big data refers to exactly. Big data has become a very popular topic in healthcare, where the term primarily refers to the vast and growing volumes of computerized medical information available in the form of electronic health records, administrative or health claims data, disease and drug monitoring registries and so on. This kind of data is generally collected routinely during administrative processes and clinical practice by different healthcare professionals: from doctors recording their patients’ medical history, drug prescriptions or medical claims to pharmacists registering dispensed prescriptions. For a long time, this data accumulated without its value being fully recognized and leveraged. Today big data has an important place in healthcare, including in pharmacovigilance. The expanding role of big data in pharmacovigilance includes signal detection, substantiation and validation of drug or vaccine safety signals, and increasingly new sources of information such as social media are also being considered. The aim of the present paper is to discuss the uses of big data for drug safety post-marketing assessment.