KDH hopes PatientLocate will change recruitment paradigm
The PatientLocate system is designed to automate the process of matching potential trial participants to inclusion and exclusion criteria in a process the firm claims will identify more qualified patients in less time at a lower cost.
The new software, which will be available early next year, is compatible with KDH’s Global Health Network, which provides trial sponsors and contract research organisations (CROs) with a secure data management network.
KDH said that a pre-release version of PatientLocate has already been successfully used by researchers at the University of California in San Francisco (USCSF) to identify 15,000 suitable patients from a pool of over 300,000.
CEO Dave Haddick said that: “With PatientLocate, our secure communications platform delivers a new, cost effective, patient recruitment solution that reduces time to completion of trials by screening thousands of previously unavailable candidates."
Dennis Cryer, CMO of patient recruitment specialist CryerHealth, also heaped praise upon the new system.
He suggested that it “has the potential to substantially improve the speed and reduce the cost of enrollment in clinical trials,” explaining that it can rapidly identify appropriate patients for screening helping keep costs down.
"Additionally, by reducing personnel involvement in the initial process, it represents a dramatic advancement over current methods of subject ascertainment and enrolment," continued Cryer.
As the pharmaceutical industry continues to expand worldwide, demand for treatment naïve patients and ethnically diverse study populations has meant that clinical trials are increasingly being conducted in several locations.
This spread increases the cost and time taken to complete an already expensive and complex process, with patient recruitment emerging as one of the key bottlenecks.
As a result demand for any solution that eases the recruitment process is likely to be high especially, if as KDH claim, the automated system can identify more appropriate patients and cut costs.
