We are excited to announce that last month our online patient-recruitment platform iConnect 2.0 went live with CenterWatch. Clinical trials professionals as well as patients trust CenterWatch to get any information related to clinical trials. It has been a reliable source and global destination for clinical trials information since its inception in 1994.
What this means is that all clinical trial search at CenterWatch is now powered by iConnect 2.0. CenterWatch provides proprietary data and information analysis on clinical trials through a variety of newsletters, books, databases, market research, benchmark reports and information services used by all industry professionals involved in the management and conduct of clinical trials.
iConnect 2.0 is a specifically designed online platform that facilitates patient-recruitment for academic medical centers, sponsors, and patient advocacy groups. Our iConnect team has been providing support to major health organisations such as, BIDMC, NYU, New York Presbyterian, and Penn Medicine to meet their patient recruitment needs.
iConnect 2.0 uses semantic search technology to allow users to search trials using layman terms or medical terminologies like Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) keywords. Semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher’s intent and hence generates more relevant search results by understanding the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace. Using iConnect 2.0 patients can search clinical trials by medical condition, by therapeutic area or by location of studies.
Patient recruitment has always been the most difficult aspect of conducting clinical trials. According to a 2011 Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (CSDD) report, two-thirds of sites don’t meet the enrolment requirements for a given trial.
Researchers can use several features of iConnect, to help them overcome challenges of patient recruitment for their clinical trials. Briefly, iConnect aids patient recruitment by:
- Creating a centralized, up-to-date listing of trials within an organisation and making it easy for a user to find a clinical trial
- Making trial page content patient-friendly and editable without IT support
- Tracking status of each patient referral
- Making communication with referrals and volunteers easy with its Volunteer Registry and Patient Notifications feature. This feature allows investigators to search volunteers from a registry by condition/age/gender/zip code to match them to available clinical trials.
- Getting Real-time recruitment status dashboard. This dashboard shows status of all of their trials along with a trend of visitors over a period of time, such as, top trials viewed and top searches performed by visitors over a period of time.
- Researchers can also edit their trials with patient friendly descriptions and relevant images.
- Increasing online outreach
- Providing provision of building clinical study specific websites
iConnect 2.0 allows your investigators to improve online awareness of their trials, communicate with interested participants, and also monitor recruitment metrics.
