Data Mining Competition To Improve Drug Safety 36
An anonymous reader writes "The OMOP Cup is a competition to find new methods for detecting drug side effects. There have been several cases over the last few years where drugs have had issues that haven't been detected for years after they were released. The proliferation of electronic medical records and pharmacy claims provides a large and potentially powerful new data source for faster detection. The problem is that the techniques for doing this on a large scale are immature. The OMOP Cup is trying to help fix that. They've already given out $5,000 for top methods, and there's $15,000 still up for grabs."
Crap derived from crap? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm curious as to what proportion of medical records were incorrect and what proportion of pharmacy claims were inaccurate. Just how useful could a database like this be, if its source data is prone to some really wacky error? Side effect misdiagnoses alone could make for a considerable slog through noise just to pick up an effect.