Oracle acquires goBalto to provide end-to-end cloud platform for clinical research

17-Oct-2018 - Last updated on 17-Oct-2018 at 20:53 GMT

(Image: Getty/peshkov)

Oracle is adding goBalto’s clinical trial site selection and activation solutions to the Oracle Health Sciences Cloud – in an aim to deliver ‘the best end-to-end clinical trial experience.’

Oracle today has announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire goBalto. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Oracle currently offers clinical trial planning, data collection, trial execution, and safety management solutions. The acquisition will see the addition of goBalto’s cloud solutions, which aim to reduce clinical trial startup time by streamlining and automating the selection and set up of research sites.

Read: goBalto goes for speed by reducing manual processes in study startups

According to companies, together, Oracle and goBalto will provide an “end-to-end cloud platform dedicated to unifying action and accelerating results for the life sciences industry.”

“Clinical trial site selection and activation is one of the most manual and time-consuming processes for our customers,” said Steve Rosenberg, senior vice president and general manager of Oracle Health Sciences Global Business Unit in a press release.

According to a report by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, the study start-up process averages 5 to 6 months in duration, though 11% of sites are never activated.

Rosenberg added, “Oracle Health Sciences is designed to provide the industry with the best end-to-end clinical trial experience and the addition of goBalto will further allow our customers to remove another barrier from delivering treatments to patients faster.”

Oracle is not providing any further comment at this time.

The goBalto goal

goBalto’s solutions are activated at more than 90,000 research sites in more than 80 countries.

The San Francisco, CA-based company in 2016 launched a trial site scoring platform, Select, which provides sponsors and contract research organizations (CROs) with the ability to weigh selection and performance variables to identify sites and target populations ideally suited to their studies.

The company's flagship product, Activate, is a study startup document and activity workflow solution which helps sponsors and CROs eliminate what it calls the three evil “e’s”: email, Excel, and e-rooms.

According to goBalto, this is achieved by using alerts, document collection, version control, and status reporting, all of which reduce the number of handoffs, errors, and downtime events that can occur during the startup phase of clinical trials.

The Oracle cloud

Earlier this year, Oracle Health Sciences released its mHealth Connector Cloud Service, which enables clinical study teams to collect remote patient data from sensors, wearables, and apps.

Jonathan Palmer, senior director of product strategy at Oracle Health Sciences called it “a scalable and extensible platform designed to quickly adapt to the myriad number of evolving data sources while delivering data in near-real-time to multiple systems and stakeholders.”

Palmer told us at the time that the new offering will help organizations “explore how digital approaches can change the way we engage with patients, acquire and interpret research data, to gain deeper insight into patient data to advance research.”

Oracle is working with several mobile health (mhealth) providers to integrate device data into Oracle’s eClinical system, Clinical One, which was launched in June 2017.