Health Tech Startup Iodine Secures $1.2M FDA Contract to Enhance openFDA Data Accessibility

San Francisco-based digital health startup Iodine has secured a $1.2 million contract by assisting the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with its openFDA data disclosure initiative, which aims to make government data more accessible and usable for developers.

One of Iodine’s co-founders, Thomas Goetz, previously served as editor-in-chief of Wired magazine before leaving journalism to join the wave of digital health innovation. In 2014, Goetz co-founded Iodine with Matt Mohebbi, a former Google software engineer.

Iodine’s Chief Technology Officer Matt Mohebbi and Chief Executive Officer Thomas Goetz noted that the openFDA contract is relatively small for the federal government, but it represents the White House’s ongoing efforts to share more government data with developers and startups. White House officials are eager to see the sharing of FDA and other health datasets, as they hope these data will be used in applications that can improve Americans’ health and enable researchers to better analyze public health trends. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) also has a similar project focused on sharing payment data. The launch of this initiative has also spurred interesting research, such as studies on price variations for the same procedures across different hospitals.

The openFDA project was launched last summer, aiming to provide developers, researchers, and the public with access to government public health databases. Iodine was hired to help build this project and begin uploading data and application programming interfaces (APIs). openFDA employs a search-based API that allows developers to perform text searches within the data. The open-source code and documentation are shared on GitHub. Although most of the data had been publicly available for some time, its format made it difficult for developers to utilize. Therefore, the Iodine team took the lead in uploading APIs for datasets of significant public interest, such as food and drug recalls, adverse events, and drug product labeling, to facilitate ease of use for developers.

With the assistance of Todd Park, the then U.S. Chief Technology Officer, openFDA also helped establish the FDA’s Office of Information Technology and Innovation (OITI).

“This new contract allows Iodine to enhance the original site and do more to help developers use continuously uploaded data,” said Thomas Goetz, CEO and co-founder of Iodine. Iodine will also continue to engage with developers who have questions and suggestions regarding the data.

“The goal of openFDA is to make publicly available FDA datasets more accessible and useful for developers, so that they know how to leverage this data, ultimately benefiting the public,” said Goetz. “The task at this stage is to make the application programming interfaces (APIs) more robust, ensuring they are trustworthy enough to be integrated into people’s applications.”

Social Health Insights, a company based in the capital of Indiana, USA, has utilized the openFDA dataset in its data visualization project, which allows users to easily check the status of food or drug recalls.

Information on Penicillin from Iodine.com In addition to its government contracts and collaboration with the FDA, the Iodine team has launched a beta version of a consumer website to help the general public gain a better understanding of medications. It integrates the FDA’s adverse event database with other datasets, enabling users to better understand potential side effects of drugs and learn from others’ real-world experiences.

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