Reuse of Adverse Effect Reports from the French National Agency of Medicines: A Visual Analytic Tool to Improve Patient Safety.

Abstract

Adverse drug reaction are defined as "harmful or unpleasant reaction, resulting from an intervention related to the use of a medicinal product". In France, adverse effects due to medicines are reported to the French National Agency of Medicines (ANSM) by the healthcare professionals or consumers. The objective of this study was to implement a tool that facilitates the utilization of ANSM reports by synthesizing information to effectively inform prescribers and users. We focused on 3 psychotropic classes: antidepressants, antipsychotics and anxiolytics. We extracted relevant data from the ANSM website through a webscraping process, based on the names of molecules in these 3 classes: antidepressants, antipsychotics, and anxiolytics. We implemented a web interface with R Shiny that provides three panels: (i) a presentation of the active ingredient with the fewest reports for a selected adverse effect category, (ii) the adverse reactions for a selected active ingredient ranked in descending order, and (iii) a comparison of two active ingredients where, for each adverse effect, the active ingredient with the fewest reported adverse drug events (ADEs) is displayed. Our application allows for synthesizing information to effectively inform prescribers and users. In the ANSM existing interface, molecules can only be viewed one by one, and the ratio needs to be calculated manually, making it difficult to compare molecules. It is important to note that this is not a prescription assistance device but rather for informational purposes. In the future, the application may be expanded to include other categories of molecules. Finally, the indicators provided by our tool could be compared to those from other pharmacovigilance databases.