There are many companies out there who have some very elaborate data bases and software to connect participants and investigators; however, what appears to be missing here is the patient and physician involvement at the point of care.
When looking for new participants it makes perfect sense to use real time updated information and for this to be a success and done quickly, instituting this information at the point of care will serve to increase the number of available participants and also create an awareness for physicians as to what is available, something that is missing with bringing electronic medical records together with clinical trial information.
This also brings to light, the need for clinical trial companies to help promote and embrace the use for personal health records, again, one more facet of bringing the point of care, physician and patient all to a technology “roundtable” at once. Once this is promoted and accomplished, the job of locating qualified candidates and bringing the knowledge to all at once, it should stand to increase awareness as well well as participation.
One vendor is working in this area called Trialx.org. Their up and coming service will allow you t connect with investigators from both Google Health and Microsoft Health Vault. The dashboard give both the patient and investigator a common dashboard and makes communication between both areas simple and easy, plus, if the patient’s other data changes, i.e. a new medication, just update the TrialX record with a new set of imported data, makes sense and is done with a few clicks and there are also alerts one can set up to alert of new trials and messages from the investigator. The patient here has the control to initiate the communication with an investigator, thus from a trial standpoint, potential clients are contacting the investigators, thus putting aside figuring out how to get in touch with patients with some type of marketing plan, in other words the interest is already there from a patient to inquire about participation.
In short, it comes back around to the education processes, so if we could align ourselves better with a bit more education processes, perhaps we could see the benefit of using real time information and at the same time further both physician and patient involvement in clinical trials before we end up losing more to other countries. This is especially important with cancer trials as we all know. BD
Below are a couple of trial companies in the news of late, for a simple comparison.
Acurian Fast Fact: Sites call Acurian weekly and ask about buying patient recruitment from us directly. As a clinical trial manager, you can feel confident that bringing Acurian on board for patient recruitment will be well received by your sites. And that means your patient recruitment investments won't be wasted.
eClinical specialist etrials Worldwide saw its losses quadruple in the third quarter on the back of a dip in revenues and financial charges, including a $4m asset impairment charge related to goodwill.
etrials, which makes software for electronic data capture and interactive voice response technologies, posted an operating loss of $6.1m – four times the year-earlier figure - on net service revenues of $3.7m for the quarter, which outgoing CEO Chuck Piccirillo described as “disappointing.”
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