The safety of modern Chinese medicine has attracted increasing attention from society. Experts and scholars have carried out extensive in-depth research on the safety of commonly used Chinese medicines from various aspects such as safety monitoring, clinical research, and experimental analysis. The findings in the safety performance of Chinese medicines can inspire the mining and analysis of relevant signals in the drug safety alerts. A variety of methods are employed for the mining of risk signals or analysis and screening of relevant signals to accurately determine the correlation between medication and adverse reactions. The safety signal acquisition and mining techniques are the technical basis for the safety risk management of medicine products after Chinese medicines are marketed, which is critical in drug safety alerts. To accurately collect the safety signals of Chinese medicines and effectively and rapidly track, determine, and assess the sources of signals are important technical links in drug risk management. The ultimate purpose of safety signal discovery is to achieve normalized risk management through downgrading drugs from a high-risk level to a low-risk level.The five main steps in the standard drug risk management are listed below: to extensively collect predicted risk signals; to accurately identify drug risks by the techniques such as data mining; to evaluate the risks with process-based quality risk control; to employ management measures minimizing the impact of drug risks for risk management; to update and apply risk assessment to clinical evaluation after medication.
Keywords: Chinese medicine; assessment; risk control; safety; signal.