Iodine Inc. Awarded $1.17 Million Contract from the Food and Drug Administration for OpenFDA project

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 29, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Iodine, a digital health company, today announced that the company was awarded a $1.17 million research & development contract by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)'s Office of Informatics and Technology Innovation to build openFDA, the agency's portal for open data. The contract follows Iodine's successful role as the initial developer of openFDA open source software, under a previous R&D contract issued in September 2013. OpenFDA is the first innovation led by Taha Kass-Hout, MD, MS, upon joining FDA in March 2013 as the agency's first Chief Health Informatics Officer and director of the Office of Informatics and Technology Innovation.

Under the contract, Iodine will enhance openFDA's current structure and resources, including augmenting current tools for accessing datasets for product adverse events, labeling, and recalls. Iodine will also assist FDA's Office of Informatics and Technology Innovation in supporting a community of users around the data.

"Iodine is committed to empowering consumers with tools for making better decisions about their health," says Thomas Goetz, Iodine's co-founder and CEO. "This partnership with FDA's Office of Informatics and Technology Innovation recognizes our unique capacity to make health-related data accessible, and to design new tools and resources around data that can positively impact the public's health. Our mission is to make health data meaningful to consumers, through our website as well as other digital tools, and this opportunity to develop openFDA can extend that objective to other software developers and researchers."

"In just a few months of existence, openFDA has become a robustly used resource for FDA's publicly available data," says Matt Mohebbi, Iodine co-founder and CTO. "This project brings tools such as ElasticSearch to FDA, and leverages a public cloud environment to make the agency's public data sets easy to access and integrate into new products and resources."

OpenFDA is a bold new FDA project with a mission to make public data readily usable by a community of researchers and software developers. OpenFDA's concept was to index high-value public-access data, format and document that data in developer and consumer-friendly standards, and make that data available via a public-access portal that enables developers to quickly and easily use it in software applications.  OpenFDA provides Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to a number of structured datasets. The project launched in June 2014 with an API for drug adverse events and has since made available data related to food and drug recalls, medical device adverse events, and drug product labels. It has quickly become a resource for researchers, media, and industry with over 7 million data calls in less than eight months. The platform is currently in public beta. 

The new contract provides for Iodine to work on enhancing openFDA resources, including bolstering existing APIs with richer data, and to further enhance the reliability and ease-of-use of the openFDA portal. Iodine's capacity for clear design and information architecture will be visible in the intuitive user interface and the plain-spoken project documentation, which makes the usefulness and context of FDA's high-value public data sets clear and accessible. Additionally, Iodine will be supporting the agency's effort to bring a community of users to the openFDA resources. The contract runs through August 2015.

About IODINE

Iodine Inc. is dedicated to giving individuals better, more actionable information about their healthcare choices - starting with medications. The company's online interactive tools enable individuals to drill into massive amounts of data from clinical research and real life experience to gain deeper insights into their choices about medications, both prescription and over-the-counter. Iodine's vision is to transform healthcare by giving people the capacity to match their needs to others' experiences, and to discern new patterns and insights by capturing the wealth of experience people have in their day-to-day lives.

Iodine was founded in San Francisco in 2013, and the company is staffed by a team of data scientists, designers, and healthcare experts. Iodine has received funding by investors including Rock Health, SV Angel, Collaborative Fund, Maveron, Spark Labs Global, and Vaizra, and angel investors including Jeremy and Michael Stoppelman and Greg Badros. More information is available at www.iodine.com.

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SOURCE Iodine Inc.

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