Facilitating Clinical Trials

Since we started Health Connect South Radio we have featured several research organizations who are doing research to uncover solutions to several illnesses such as Ebola, HIV, mitochondral diseases, diabetes, and others.

This week we featured two companies who are facilitating clinical trials through their respective solutions. Bethany Bray, CEO of AutoCruitment and Ryan Jones, CEO of Florence Healthcare joined us to share how they are working to help new medicines and devices become available more quickly to the community.

AutoCruitment is a technology platform that interacts with a variety of internet search platforms to acquire particular analytics data. The platform is able to identify internet users who are seeking clinical trials or even ones who appear to be seeking new physicians.

Bethany shared that as much as 40% of the cost of a trial comes from efforts to put out information about the study and recruit appropriate patients for it.

Once a potential patient is identified who might be a match for a clinical trial, AutoCruitment is able to display ads on healthcare related sites that individual visits that will alert them to the availability of the trial. The algorithms work to position the advertisements in what would be contextually-relevant places to avoid the “stalker” feel some cookie driven ads take on.

From the point the patient follows the ad, the process of providing their information and getting linked up with the prospective trial is straight-forward and elegant, making it simple for the patient and the respective trial.

Many clinical trials involve multiple sites for data collection as well as analysis. In spite of the technological advancements around patient data over the past decade, in clinical trials, much of the research data is collected or reported on paper documents.

The process of transmitting this data to the other sites that need to access it to move the study forward is cumbersome at best. In some cases it means analysts and study overseers must physically travel to the study locations to get access to or evaluate the data. In others it means shipping literally truckloads of paper documents to another site.

This logistical logjam is one of the greatest reasons why it can take as long as it does to complete a study, as Ryan explained. Florence Healthcare is working to tackle this problem by developing a secure technology platform that uses existing hardware such as faxes and scanners to be able to quickly and securely convert the paper data to digital forms that can be readily transmitted to the other study sites or evaluated by study reviewers.

Special Guests:

Bethany Bray, CEO of AutoCruitment