Some startling facts:
- Prescription drug spending in the US reached a whopping $329.2 billion in 2013.
- In 2011, 4.02 billion prescriptions were written in the US, with more than half of Americans on two prescription drugs.
- Drug side effects are a leading cause of death in hospitals and may be the leading cause of death outside hospitals.
- 100% of patients suffer unintended effects from their prescriptions.
- The annual cost of drug side effects is estimated to be considerably more than $100 billion, yet comprehensive, relevant data necessary to manage a solution is not collected.
- More than 95% of drug side effects go unreported, and there are serious gaps and delays in getting relevant feedback on effects of pharmaceuticals once they are released to the market.
- Regulators do not have reporting systems geared to capturing the data needed for effective post-market monitoring.
The way we see it, there are two real problems here:
- There is a lopsided relationship between vulnerable patients and their doctors who have extraordinary power and knowledge over them.
- The systems and organizations we all rely on to keep us safe are fundamentally broken.
Our Mission:
Making medicines safer for all of us.
RxISK is owned and operated by Data Based Medicine Americas Ltd. (DBM), based in Toronto, Canada.
It is run by a group of high-profile medical experts with international reputations in early drug-side-effect detection and risk mitigation, pharmacovigilance, and patient-centered care.
RxISK was launched in October 2012 with the goals of:
- Educating and empowering patients to have better conversations about their meds with their doctors.
- Collecting data on the unintended consequences of prescription medications so that we can draw attention to them.
Other DBM related sites include:
