FDA Releases Source Code for New Health Reporting App

The FDA recently announced that it is making the source code for the MyStudies application public and free for alteration. The application, developed in cooperation with medical care provider Kaiser Permanente, seeks to collect real-world health data from a variety of static and user-reported sources to better inform clinical and observational trials and studies. 

The application gives clinics and sponsors the ability to better understand the population they are serving, and the release of the source code opens a wealth of opportunities for clinics and health researchers to customize the application to the information they seek to collect. For consumers, this means a more tailored experience while reporting under FDA security and privacy regulations and parameters.

"Better capture of real world data, collected from a variety of sources, has the potential to make our new drug development process more efficient, improve safety and help lower the cost of product development," says FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb.

The application gives clinics and health researchers the ability to quickly find and research the latest medical research, supplemented by user-provided data, and could affect future health-based legislative efforts.

The FDA says the source code will differ from the application currently in circulation, but that it will be making the source code available for both Apple's ResearchKit and the Google Android-based ResearchStack frameworks over the next few quarters. The code is now available on the FDA GitHub repository.