Novartis, Pfizer, and Eli Lilly partner for new clinical trial software platform

57% Americans would be interested in participating in a clinical trial. However, most clinical studies struggles to recruit sufficient patients. The issue has attracted a number or software as well contract service firms that specialize in clinical trial recruitment, even using social medial tools. Then there is long going debate and efforts for integrating EHR data into clinical trial and identifying potential suitable target population of patients directly from de-identified EHR data

In order to connect patients and researchers, Novartis, Pfizer and Eli Lilly and Company, are partnering in the U.S. to provide a new platform to improve access to information about clinical trials. The platform will enhance clinicaltrials.gov and is expected to be launched by early 2014 with a database of about 50 clinical research studies from the participating companies.

The new platform will provide more detailed and patient-friendly information about the trials, including a machine readable “target health profile” to improve the ability of healthcare software to match individual health profiles to applicable clinical trials.

As part of the project, patients can search for trials using their own Blue Button data. To preserve data privacy de-identified Blue Button data, used only as an “index to search,” will not be stored anywhere outside of the patient’s application.

Other sponsors of clinical research studies may upload information about their trials, while software companies develop tools to deliver this information to interested patients.