About Us
Why RxISK?
Drug side effects are now a leading cause of death, disability, and illness. Experts estimate that only 1–10% of “serious” adverse events (those causing hospitalization, disability, or death) are ever reported. Not to mention the millions of “medically mild” adverse drug events that occur each year — ones that compromise a person’s concentration, functioning, judgment, and ability to care.
RxISK is the first free, independent website where patients, doctors, and pharmacists can research prescription drugs and easily report a drug side effect — identifying problems and possible solutions earlier than is currently happening.
Why Should You Report?
| No one knows drug side effects like the person who is taking a pill.Yet your voice is increasingly being silenced.You and your doctor may have been told there is no evidence linking the treatment you are on to the problems you are experiencing. This is because most data on prescription drugs is owned by the multinational pharmaceutical companies who run almost all clinical drug trials (60% of which are never reported). They simply are not sharing data that may affect their bottom lines.There is a gap in the data that only patients, doctors, and pharmacists can fill. | If you think there is a problem, you’re probably right…— Dr. David Healy |
Help yourself while helping others
RxISK helps you research prescription drugs, but you can do so much more by reporting a drug side effect and adding your anonymized experience to the data on prescription drugs.
Free RxISK Report
Our secure reporting process allows you to identify which drugs you are taking and comment on their effects on your health and life. The resulting RxISK Report is a customized printout that provides you with, among other things, your RxISK Score indicating how likely it is that you are experiencing a drug side effect.
You can take this report to your doctor or pharmacist to support and inform your conversation about whether you are experiencing a drug side effect.
Report a drug side effect and get your free RxISK Report.
See what’s happening with other people
We make the current data from FDA accessible and free through easy-to-understand visuals and tables. As drug side effect reports come into RxISK from around the world, this anonymized data will be added “real time” to the RxISK database. The RxISK data will be much more detailed and relevant to the conversations between patients, doctors, and pharmacists on drug side effects.
Report to your country’s drug regulator
We also provide an option where you can create a pre-filled form (with the data you have already reported on RxISK) that you can easily send to your country’s regulator — for example, the FDA in the United States, Health Canada in Canada, and Yellow Card in the United Kingdom.
Transparency
Transparency is important to us.
To provide the information and services to you on RxISK, free of charge, and to remain independent of advertising or sponsorship, our funding model is that we sell subscriptions to the anonymized, aggregated data we collect to anyone who wants it. This may include major players in healthcare, such as governments, health insurers, and pharmaceutical companies. This critical data, which is not currently being collected or reported, will improve drug safety and help lower healthcare costs.
We will not sell client lists or personal details. We will not enter into contracts or arrangements that could compromise the independence of the data we collect.
We have set up a community advisory board of people who have relatives injured by adverse events, health care activists, and independent scientists to monitor our business interactions.
See our Privacy Policy. If you want to learn more, please contact us at info@RxISK.org.
Our Medical and Research Team
There are few professionals who have the profile and international reputation of our founding team, which includes people who have risked their careers in speaking out about adverse drug events, such as David Healy and Nancy Olivieri, as well as international experts on pharmaco-vigilance such as Ralph Edwards from World Health Organization’s Uppsala Monitoring Center.
Dr. David Healy, Chief Executive Officer and principal founder of Data Based Medicine Americas Ltd., is an internationally respected psychiatrist, psychopharmacologist, scientist, and author. A professor of Psychiatry at Cardiff University in Wales, David is a former Secretary of the British Association for Psychopharmacology, and has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed articles, 200 other pieces, and 20 books.
David has been involved as an expert witness in homicide and suicide trials involving psychotropic drugs, and in bringing problems with these drugs to the attention of American and British regulators, as well raising awareness of how pharmaceutical companies sell drugs by marketing diseases and co-opting academic opinion-leaders, ghost-writing their articles. His latest book, Pharmageddon, documents the riveting and terrifying story of how pharmaceutical companies have hijacked healthcare in America and the life-threatening results.
He also publishes through his blog DavidHealy.org and on Twitter @DrDavidHealy.
Dr. Derelie (Dee) Mangin, Data Based Medicine America Ltd.’s Chief Medical Officer, a family doctor in Christchurch, New Zealand, is also a professor and Director of Research in the Department of Public Health and General Practice in the University of Otago in New Zealand, as well as an advisor to the New Zealand government on drug treatment funding priorities. Dee has advocated for more than a decade for better independent information for patients and their doctors on drugs. Her research focuses on rational use of drugs, using real drugs and real patients. Dee is a frequent speaker at international conferences for family doctors with a focus on patient-centred medicine.
Dr. Kalman Applbaum is Professor of Medical Anthropology and Global Studies at the University of Wisconsin. He is a pharmaceutical industry expert and former marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management.
Dr. Ralph Edwards was Director of the Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC) from 1990 to 2009. UMC is the World Health Organisation (WHO) Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring located in Sweden. Under his management the global coverage of pharmacovigilance now actively involves work, in over 120 countries. The UMC provides necessary IT and other support for pharmacovigilance centres, as well as training. Ralph has campaigned for better communication of drug safety issues, better benefit-to-risk assessment of drugs, performance assessments of pharmacovigilance centres, and better individual patient safety consideration during medication in clinical practice. He was a founding member of the European Society of Pharmacovigilance, was the founding President (2000-2004) of the ensuing International Society of Pharmacovigilance, and is among the world’s leading experts on pharmaco-vigilance, and has published widely.
Dr. Brenda Gallie is Director of the Retinoblastoma Program at The Hospital for Sick Children, and Professor of Ophthalmology, Molecular Genetics, and Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto. Her research has revealed basic molecular processes in cancer. She has developed a time-line for medical adverse events to enable patients and doctors to better understand how the adverse event might have evolved — this is incorporated into RxISK.
Robert Whitaker is the co-founder of Centerwatch (in 1994), an early provider of market intelligence on pharmaceutical companies for investment analysts and others. He is the author of Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic, which analyze the consequences of the indiscriminate use of medications. Robert also publishes through his blog, Mad in America, and on Twitter @WhitakerRB.
Dr. Joanna Le Noury is Senior Research Scientist in the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine. She trained as a biological psychologist and has previously been involved in the development of an international programme aimed at improving health and nutrition in young children, which has since been implemented across several European countries and the US. More recently her research interest has focussed on looking at the incidence and prevalence of serious mental illness, along with comorbidity and mortality rates associated with psychiatric disorders. In addition she has analyzed several large pharmaceutical databases in the course of litigation cases.
Dr. Nancy Olivieri is a Senior Scientist at Toronto General Hospital, and a Professor of Pediatrics, Medicine, and Public Health Sciences at the University of Toronto. Her work explores the role of the pharmaceutical industry in society, and its influence on research and on the evidence base of medicine.
Our Business Team
Peter Wood, CPA, FCA, is an Ernst & Young retired partner with expertise in tax, corporate management, and leading-edge technology who has developed several successful web-based businesses. We are fortunate to have Peter leading our business team of operations, finance, marketing, technology, and design professionals.
