Open Pharmacovigilance

OpenPV: 

This tool enables signal detection for adverse drug reactions in the UK national spontaneous database, called the Yellow Card Scheme. It is a research and educational tool and should not be used for clinical decisions.

OpenPV contains all Yellow Card adverse drug reaction reports published by the UK Medicines and Healthcare products regulatory agency (MHRA).  The tool is updated quarterly (last update: March 2025). More detailed description of the data is available here.  

User instructions: 

• Type drug name in the drug search box.  Note that this does not search by drug class but by recorded drug name within the Yellow Card database.  
  
  

• Click search and select appropriate drug.
  
  

• Type MedDRA preferred term (PT) symptom in the search symptom box. Note that all possible terms that are reported for the entire Yellow Card database are included in the search function, even if there are no reports for the drug in question. If you cannot find the term - please refer to MedDRA terms in the MHRA interactive drug analysis profiles.
  
  

• Click search and select appropriate MedDRA preferred term.
  
  

• Click calculate signal.
  
  

• Use the additional metrics toggle to switch between different pharmacovigilance signal methods (reporting odds ratio, proportional reporting ratio, information component, empirical Bayes geometric mean). Users are invited to familiarise themselves with these methods.   
  
  

• You can download the raw results as a csv file.

Key points: 

• The information on this website relates to suspected side effects , i.e. medical events that have been observed following the use of a medicine, but which are not necessarily related to or caused by the medicine.
   

• Information on suspected side effects should not be interpreted as meaning that the medicine or the active substance causes the observed effect or is unsafe to use.
  
  

• The tool is based on disproportionality statistics - showing how much more or less an adverse event is reported for a drug compared to the background reporting for that same symptom across all other drugs within the Yellow Card  Scheme database.
  
  

• Please note that all searches are anonymously stored so that the OpenPV platform can analyse search frequencies. It is our intention to publish data relating to search frequencies over time.