Clinical trials Patient Recruitment done right with Web 2.0 and Social Networking

One of the biggest challenges in conducting clinical trials is recruiting the right patients. It’s an often expensive, time-consuming, and difficult process where you usually need contract firms or other specialists to do your recruitments.

This week I learned about a New York based healthcare IT startup, TrialX, which is doing some pretty innovative stuff around patient recruitment by using Google’s and Microsoft’s personal health platforms to help match patients with specific trials.

It looks pretty friendly and uses natural language processing to deal with unstructured data instead of forcing lots of data structuring and discrete data capture and analysis alone (which is how existing firms do their matching).

A neat little widget is also provided so that TrialX can also be  integrated into websites. And, while Google and Microsoft are the initial PHRs they will work iwht, they said they are looking to integrate with PHRs such as Dossia/Indivo Health and others soon.

This is a company worth watching to see how the clinical trials segment of the Pharma industry can benefit.