Promoting and protecting the public health.

The modern era, but biology is still catching up.

The standard for search suggestion & results

People still used Internet Explorer—for real.

Barely one year into Obama’s first term. People were listening to Rihanna sing about finding love in a hopeless place. The iPhone 3GS was the hottest thing.

Web 2.0 is still pretty new, but animation, interactivity, and more data are coming to even the previously static Google Search UI.

Google Chrome hadn’t yet come out, Web 2.0 was still a thing. Android was brand new.

Google plays a huge role in public emergencies, like pandemics. We worked with HHS to provide public health guidance and to direct people to resources like flu vaccine clinics

As if the financial crisis wasn’t enough, here was a potentially serious pandemic.

The era of ”Big Data,” and just getting a handle on how to structure it.

Empowering people to find what works, faster

People were listening on their iPhone 6 to Hotline Bling.

Portable tech was coming of age—it was the year of the Apple Watch.

Folks might have been dancing to Happy by Pharrell Williams.

A new standard for open public health data

Governments were just starting to adopt modern technologies, and yes, we still had to support Internet Explorer.

The authoritative source on Mac user interface design.

Apple just released the iPod. Google just got out of beta. If you had a cell phone at all, it was a flip phone.

A lot of software still came in boxes—on a CD.

## **Public health data**—organized, documented, and made accessible to programmers **and** the the public.

## **How to make open data more accessible?** Organize and document it, speed it up, make it useful for developers, and be seen by the public.

![Alt](/content/projects/openfda/p_splash.png)

Shepherded by FDA’s first Chief Health Informatics Officer, Taha Kass-Hout, openFDA is an open-source, search-based suite of fast, contemporary APIs for important drug, medical device, and food datasets. The entire project is online on GitHub, the data are open (CC0) worldwide, and it provides unprecedented open access to health data about drug and medical device adverse reactions, pharmaceutical product labeling, and product recall information.

![Alt](/content/projects/openfda/p_explorerAnimation.gif)

The design reasonably serves a challenging dual purpose: Interactively teach people how to use the API, *and* communicate and allow non-experts to learn from the data themselves. Indeed, this is in many ways the only place that this important public health data have been published in a way that highlights insights. Thus while openFDA’s audience is developers, the design extends an olive branch to the general public. This project set a new standard for government open data, thanks to the hard work of Taha, Sean Herron (a Presidential Innovation Fellow), and the elegant work of our FDA and Iodine team members.

![Alt](/content/projects/openfda/p_adverseEventsOverTime.png)

As part of the Iodine team who built openFDA under contract to FDA, I co-designed and documented the API endpoints themselves (again, the first time the data have been so thoroughly documented), and designed and built the website, including the interactive query explorer and other tools.

![Alt](/content/projects/openfda/p_openFDAQueryExplorer.png)

Public health data—organized, documented, and made accessible to programmers and the the public.

openFDA

Designer and developer