The individuals who possess the expertise to synthesize evidence on a medication’s safety are hindered by numerous disconnected “islands of information”

A workgroup within the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI, http://ohdsi.org) collaborative is addressing this issue by establishing an open-source community effort to develop a global knowledge base that brings together and standardizes all available information for all drugs and all health outcomes of interest from all electronic sources pertinent to drug safety

Striving toward the goal of a generally useful knowledge base, though ambitious, is necessary for advancing the science of drug safety because it will make it simpler for practitioners to access, retrieve, and synthesize evidence so that they can reach a rigorous and accurate assessment of causal relationships between a given drug and the health outcome of interest