SideShare: giving patients a voice on medication side effects

An Israeli platform is aiming to close a longstanding gap in how patients report adverse drug reactions, giving them a direct channel to share their experiences without going through a doctor’s visit or formal paperwork.

SideShare, a free web-based platform, allows patients to report side effects from their medication anonymously, in their own words. Founder Meir Ohayon and Scientific Director Michal Davidescu, PhD, told HealthTechAsia the platform was built to widen the picture of how drugs perform once they reach real-world patients, beyond the narrower populations typically studied in clinical trials, which often exclude groups such as children and the elderly.

“We believe that by using our platform, we allow doctors and researchers to see a wider picture,” Ohayon said.

A gap between trials and everyday use

Clinical trials are designed around defined patient populations, and formal adverse event reporting systems typically rely on patients going through a doctor or pharmacist to file a report.

Ohayon and Davidescu said this leaves a substantial amount of real-world experience uncaptured, particularly for patients managing side effects on their own between medical appointments, with no easy way to compare their experience against others or flag it to anyone beyond their own clinician.

Patients complete a short form covering the drug taken, timing, side effects experienced, age range and gender, along with an open text field where they can describe their experience in their own words. SideShare’s AI structures that free text into a formal adverse event entry.

Patients can also indicate whether they are tolerating a medication well, with no side effects to report, or whether they are considering switching treatment.

Each submission feeds into a dashboard for the relevant drug, which also incorporates data from the FDA and community-reported side effects, alongside information drawn from the drug’s own leaflet.

In a demonstration during the interview, the founders showed a dashboard for a single breast cancer medication, illustrating how reported side effects, demographic breakdowns and switching intentions can be visualised at a glance.

The dashboard can also generate a summary as a shareable PDF, accessible via a QR code, intended to give patients a document they can bring to a consultation with their doctor.

The founders described the current build as an early-stage minimum viable product, with plans to refine the analysis tools as the volume of data grows, and said the next step is to identify signals in the data worth acting on rather than simply presenting raw figures.

Davidescu, who works as a pharmacist in a government hospital in Israel, said the idea grew out of a gap she and Ohayon observed directly in clinical practice, including instances where side effects lead doctors to deviate from approved treatment protocols without patients necessarily understanding why.

“We see patients, we see doctors, we can see where there are gaps,” Davidescu said.

Anonymous by design

SideShare does not collect patient names or medical records, a deliberate design choice the founders said lowers the barrier to reporting.

“This is the advantage, because sometimes patients do not want to give personal details,” Davidescu said.

The founders said they rely on the scale and geographic spread of submissions, rather than identity verification, to guard against bias or manipulation of the dataset, including by pharmaceutical companies with a commercial interest in the results.

“If the distribution of data is similar between countries, it means there is no bias At scale, with geographically diverse reports, coordinated manipulation becomes easier to detect , making it less likely to distort the overall picture,” Ohayon said.

Early traction, no paid promotion

Launched around eight months ago, SideShare has collected close to 400 reports to date, with the founders saying submissions have come from patients in more than a dozen countries.

Growth so far has come entirely through unpaid social media promotion, primarily Facebook, with the founders saying they believe paid promotion would meaningfully increase reporting volumes if pursued.

The platform is not currently listed on app stores and operates as a web app, with the founders estimating that 70 to 80 percent of use is via mobile browsers.

Content is currently in English, though the founders said AI translation tools could extend the platform’s reach into other languages as it grows, describing the potential user base as global by design rather than limited to any single market.

SideShare is free for patients, with the founders exploring a limited paid tier for additional features, priced at around five dollars. The longer-term commercial model centres on licensing aggregated data and statistical analysis to pharmaceutical companies and health organisations once the dataset reaches sufficient scale, an approach with some parallel to how employer-review platforms turn large volumes of anonymised feedback into a commercial product.

The founders are now seeking a pilot partnership with a healthcare provider or pharmaceutical company to test and validate the platform at scale.

Both said that, as a two-person team without an established profile outside clinical circles, forming that kind of partnership has proven difficult so far, and that they are actively looking for introductions that could help move a pilot forward.