Tweeting for Trials – TrialX Wins New York Entrepreneur Week Venture Competition Award

I have been somewhat following this company since they started out, and at that point were questioning if there was in fact a market for this type of product, and I think we have the answer now, of course there is. I also have their widget on my blog for a quick and easy look up for clinical trials. Here’s a link to a prior post that explains more.

Use Twitter to Find Clinical Trials – TrialX.Org

Also, this week the company was the winner of the New York Entrepreneur Week Venture Competition Award. I have tried the Twitter service and it works quite well and is great for a quick look up. Obviously, having the match with your PHR records in Google Health or HealthVault is the real charm for a concise match and the ability to connect with an investigator too. The related reading below has many links that give additional details on how it works. Personal Health Records are the future and until every health care facility is connected, consider a PHR the best back up you could ever have relative to your health records. BD

April 27, 2009 | Yet another patient recruitment tool has just been released by New York-based Applied Informatics. But this one is a “do-it-yourself” platform that moves the search for clinical trials onto social media sites like Twitter. It also allows would-be subjects with a personal health record (PHR) in Microsoft HealthVault or Google Health to import the information in lieu of filling out an online pre-screening form to be matched for trials.

“Eighty percent of consumers who are online are searching for health information,” says Sharib Khan, co-founder of the new TrialX platform. As many as two million of them are looking specifically for clinical trials or new disease treatments. They frequently discover sites like ClinicalTrials.gov, the massive registry of the NIH, but can quickly get overwhelmed trying to sort through the listings to find a few potentially suitable trials.

TrialX is likewise designed to “empower” investigators who lack the budget for newspaper and radio ad campaigns, the time to field a lot of “false positive” calls, and the know-how to develop their own trials website, says Khan. TrialX gives them a single place to create a profile of their site and trials, receive legitimate leads, communicate directly with those prospects, and get performance reports on the resulting activity – all for between $99 and $299 per month per trial. The fee excludes marketing of their trials on Google, triggered by specific keyword searches, which can cost as little as $1 a day.