Using patient-reported experiences for pharmacovigilance?

Recent international guidelines encourage more prominent placement of patient-generated information about medications on the pharmacovigilance information landscape. Online platforms where patients share medication experiences with one another and with healthcare professionals are one possible avenue to accomplishing this goal. Public reports of medication-related events posted on the web, however, are under-utilized in the pharmacovigilance community. Moreover, little is known about who writes such reviews, what information is shared and how this information can be used by authorities. This paper reports the first results of a study of user and comment characteristics on a European-based platform.