Posts about open data sources and accessibility
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The unfair choice between not easy to use and not easy to afford.
I remember years ago hearing for the first time that in order to know how much drugs cost, people had to pay for a license to a drug information provider. And I don't mean "how much do drugs cost with a GoodRx coupon" — I mean how much does it generally cost a pharmacy to purchase a bottle of a specific medication product.
More than you might think...
Open drug data is a powerful resource for healthcare, pharmacy, and research professionals. While it has some gaps, it serves as a foundation for innovation, providing key insights without the barriers of proprietary systems. With the right tools to fill in these gaps, open drug data can rival — and even surpass — commercial databases in accessibility, interoperability, and fostering innovation.
Sometimes you get what you pay for. Sometimes the alternative is too expensive.
For the past year or so, we've been going down rabbit holes discovering more and more sources of open drug data, each with its own differences and quirks. By "drug data" we mean data about drugs - typically (but not only) from US government sources like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Library of Medicine (NLM), and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). These organizations do a reasonably good job at presenting and sharing their own siloed data; however, they all seem to use different data formats, structures, and update frequencies.
You would have to be some weird combination of data scientist, software engineer, and clinician to sustainably aggregate and combine data from these sources in a meaningful way.
Luckily we are.
