Back to the Future: The Evolution of Pharmacovigilance in the Age of Digital Healthcare

Abstract

Pharmacovigilance originated in an attempt to better understand the safety of drugs so that we can protect individual patients and consumers. Over time the development of the field has been heavily influenced by the need for the pharmaceutical industry to fulfill regulatory requirements, with the unintended result of losing track of the individual patient. With the onset of digitized healthcare data, we have an opportunity to reunite the industrial and personal in pharmacovigilance. Informatics can help with this by focusing future work on a pharmacovigilance research agenda.