Datathon: Identification of Adverse Drug Reactions from Social Media

We are delighted to invite teams to participate in one-day datathon to assess the current state-of-the-art in the identification of adverse drug reactions from social media posts. The aim of the event is to identify challenges and potential collaborations that would lead to a grant proposal(s). The event is co-organised by Healtex and HealthUnlocked, and will be held in London on September 28th, 2018. Travel expenses etc. will be covered by the network.

This datathon follows a Healtex feasibility study that looks into how much information required for Yellow Card reports (a scheme used by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to monitor the safety of all healthcare products in the UK) is present in social media posts. We have produced an annotated dataset of 200 posts from five communities present in HealthUnlocked, and the datathon will aim to provide access to that dataset to the Healtex community to understand the feasibility of automated extraction of the core Yellow Card data (e.g. treatment indication, drug, side effect, severity, outcome etc). The annotation guidelines are available here.

We invite teams that are willing to experiment with different (existing or lightly-tailored) solutions on the datasets so that we can assess the feasibility of filling in Yellow Cards automatically. Following the datathon, interested participants may want to collaborate with the organisers to submit a joint funding proposal to address the challenges.

If you are interested to take part in this datathon, please apply by September 7th by sending a brief description (not more than one A4 page) of the team (up to 3 people), what your experience is and what you aim to contribute for the event. Please email it to contact@healtex.org.