Washington D.C. - The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced a research partnership with PatientsLikeMe, an online patient community, to explore the potential for patient-generated health data to identify dangerous drugs. The FDA already collects data about instances of dangerous drug side effects, called adverse events, though its access to this information is limited to patients who voluntarily report adverse events directly to the FDA and aggregated data from insurers and electronic medical records. FDA hopes this new partnership, which grants it access to 110,000 adverse event reports related to 1,000 different medications from PatientsLikeMe users who voluntarily share their data, will allow for more a detailed understanding of how patients take medicine.