The TrialX tagline is Enabling patients to find new treatments (and clinical trials). Their mission is to To help save lives by providing patients access to new treatments in an easy and timely manner. So what does all that mean?
TrialX is a HealthIT startup, whose core technology matches participants to clinical trials (as an aside, why do sites have to add words like “groundbreaking” and “first of its kind” to About pages?). Essentially the goal is to create a platform for patients to find trials of interest and for investigators to find patients for trial recruitment.
So underneath the hood you have a search engine, a matching algorithm and a mechanism to contact investigators. As a platform, nothing too radical. I suspect that’s how most dating sites work. Perhaps most interestingly they can use as source information existing online Personal Health Records, specifically Google Health and HealthVault. It would appear that this ties into existing authentication mechanisms for those services but need to look into those further. Reminds me that I should probably do more with those services than simply play with them, since I do such a bad jobs of maintaining my own health records on paper.
In principal the idea is pretty good. It allows you to take existing information and interests (in this case health related), and find related activities (in this case clinical trials). There are some questions as well. A lot of people who might benefit from this aren’t exactly online, so how is this actually impacting (or will impact) patient recruitment? What kind of uptake is being seen?
My guess is that true success is some years away as our online PHRs get more common and populated, and we get a critical mass of people online and using such tools, because the utility is certainly there.
Matchmaking clinical trials style
The TrialX tagline is Enabling patients to find new treatments (and clinical trials). Their mission is to To help save lives by providing patients access to new treatments in an easy and timely manner. So what does all that mean?
TrialX is a HealthIT startup, whose core technology matches participants to clinical trials (as an aside, why do sites have to add words like “groundbreaking” and “first of its kind” to About pages?). Essentially the goal is to create a platform for patients to find trials of interest and for investigators to find patients for trial recruitment.
So underneath the hood you have a search engine, a matching algorithm and a mechanism to contact investigators. As a platform, nothing too radical. I suspect that’s how most dating sites work. Perhaps most interestingly they can use as source information existing online Personal Health Records, specifically Google Health and HealthVault. It would appear that this ties into existing authentication mechanisms for those services but need to look into those further. Reminds me that I should probably do more with those services than simply play with them, since I do such a bad jobs of maintaining my own health records on paper.
In principal the idea is pretty good. It allows you to take existing information and interests (in this case health related), and find related activities (in this case clinical trials). There are some questions as well. A lot of people who might benefit from this aren’t exactly online, so how is this actually impacting (or will impact) patient recruitment? What kind of uptake is being seen?
My guess is that true success is some years away as our online PHRs get more common and populated, and we get a critical mass of people online and using such tools, because the utility is certainly there.
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