This is the 21st century. In a matter of few clicks, you can find a buyer for your garage garbage on ebay and earn some cool bucks. You can find a date on match.com (if not atleast get emails saying , “there are 100 people who match your profile”). But is healthcare so back in the dark ages, that we need to post flyers with strips of “contact us” tags on doors leading to gyms, or elevators of a hospital to find eligible participants for a clinical trial?
Such flyers are a common site in many medical centers, hospitals or doctors’ clinics. Flyers, with words like “are you suffering from depression? Are you above 55 yrs, then perhaps you will qualify for this study. Call us at ……” Have you really cared to read such ads and if yes, even to take the effort of noting the number and calling the contact.
I saw the above flyer posted for several days and this is a very frequently used door – it leads to the gym in a large medical center and draws hundreds of eyeballs and yet hardly any one notices.
Its about time there are better “matching” services than doctors and their research teams posting flyers on lift doors. How hard can it be to find the right participants if in a city of 8 million people, a brooklyn boy who spots a girl in the subway and is able to track her down by just posting her sketch on a website in less then 48 hrs!
We at Trialx.org are working towards building a solution that enables research investigators and patients to “find each other” and connect. So that we can all bid goodbyes to such flyers. Next time you are in the elevator of a hospital, take note of the flyers and then check back later if they are still around when Trialx.org is in full swing!
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