Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) – unintended, potentially harmful effects of medication – pose a serious threat to modern healthcare, as they continue to be a major cause of mortality and morbidity, leading to loss of billions of dollars every year. At the same time, misleading information on drug safety spreads ubiquitously through various online channels, posing a risk to public health and negatively influencing public trust. Dashboards for drug safety information tracking can be a useful tool to address these issues. By improving understandability of drug safety data, visual dashboards contribute to better decision-making of professional users (e.g., healthcare professionals) and better adherence to medication therapies of non-professional users (e.g., patients). 

In this Design Science Research (DSR) study, we develop design principles (DPs) to guide the design of dashboards in drug safety surveillance. We use the concept of affordances (i.e., properties of objects or relationships between actors and objects) – to support DPs formulation and guide the artefact development. By engaging in DSR activities, we refine initial, theory-based DPs in three rounds of iterative design, development, demonstration and evaluation with experts (i.e., researchers with expertise in drug screening and development, bioinformatics and data science) and non-experts (i.e., drug consumers) as potential end-users. We show that following these DPs give rise to a purposeful artefact – a high-fidelity prototype of dashboard for drug safety surveillance. 

Our theoretical contribution is twofold: first, we provide a list of final, revised, empirically-driven DPs. Second, we contribute to the understanding on how the notion of affordance can support development of dashboards in pharmacovigilance. Finally, we contribute practically through our prototype, thus opening the access to drug safety data to the broader public. We suggest our findings can be useful for a class of similar systems and settings.