Table 1.

Major challenges related to exploiting patient posts in pharmacovigilance.

Question	Challenge	Response? Process? Solution?
How to manage social media quality?	Variable quality of information on social media	Identify social media that present high-quality content regarding relevance and completeness of information for pharmacovigilance purposes
How to manage data privacy?	Guarantee of data privacy	Take into account data privacy of patients posting on the Internet
How to deal with pharmacovigilance main objectives?	Response to pharmacovigilance expert expectations	Identify the optimal framework where analysis of patient posts can usefully complement usual pharmacovigilance processes
How to identify relevant information within patient posts?	Identification and processing of relevant information (eg, drugs and adverse reactions) within Web pages	Extract, process, and render relevant information on drugs and their adverse reactions
How to manage scalability related to big data collection in social media?	Robust and evolutive architecture	Take into account the evolution of the platform and the high quantity of data available on the Internet that requires specific methods for big data collection and storage