Developing a Crowdsourcing Approach and Tool for Pharmacovigilance Education Material Delivery

The number of pharmacovigilance professionals worldwide is increasing with a high staff turnover. There is a constant stream of new colleagues with an interest or need to learn about the discipline. Consequently, there is an increasing need for training in pharmacovigilance. An important step towards this has been made through developing and publishing the World Health Organization (WHO)-International Society of Pharmacovigilance (ISoP) Pharmacovigilance Curriculum. Using the Pharmacovigilance Curriculum effectively, it should be supplemented by providing comprehensive training material from various sources, and making the Pharmacovigilance Curriculum attractive and a high-utility product. We describe a pilot of the development and initial evaluation of a crowdsourcing tool for the provision of pharmacovigilance education material. Pharmacovigilance experts shared links to their material to sections of relevance in the hierarchy and a small group of organisations conducted an initial testing. In this pilot, we have shown the usability of such a web-based tool. The strengths of this approach include the potential for a routine 'democratic' approach to sharing educational material to a wider community and an openness for access.