Engaging patients: Building trust and support for safety surveillance

The Sentinel System is a state of the art active surveillance system relying on a distributed data network to rapidly scale analysis of health care data collected from over 178 million patients nationwide. Sentinel is an important safety surveillance tool used by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and its underlying distributed data infrastructure is increasingly being recognized to have the potential to support the needs of diverse stakeholders including other public health agencies, health systems, regulated industry, and the clinical research enterprise. Despite Sentinel’s importance in safety surveillance, patients are largely unaware of Sentinel’s public health mission and commitment to protecting patient privacy. Therefore, it is both timely and critical to identify opportunities to raise awareness and build trust for Sentinel safety surveillance among patients, consumers, and the general public.

On June 23, the Center for Health Policy at Brookings, in collaboration with the FDA, hosted an expert workshop to discuss opportunities to raise awareness of the Sentinel System through improved communication to patients and consumers. Participants, including Sentinel Data Partners, patient focused organizations (e.g., consumer advocacy groups), experts in patient privacy, ethics, and health literacy, and representatives from the FDA explored possible opportunities where each stakeholder might be uniquely positioned to engage with patients, and how these communications could be designed and delivered effectively. Discussions from this workshop resulted in recommendations including a set of guiding principles, potential tools, and strategies to improve awareness of the Sentinel System, but more broadly, safety surveillance activities led by the FDA.