According to a story from outsourcing-pharma.com, the company Iqvia has just launched its all-new patient portal. However, while many patient portals are intended to allow for patients to monitor their own treatment or contribute personal data to ongoing research studies about their disease, Iqvia’s patient portal is designed with a new purpose in mind: to support clinical trial participants.
Why Clinical Trials?
The global, web-based portal is based on the Salesforce Health Cloud platform. However, the reader may asking themselves why a patient portal focused on clinical trial participants is such as big deal in the first place. Unfortunately, the reality is that while participating in a clinical trial may be the best chance that a rare disease patient has to get effective treatment, it also can take a serious toll on the patient. While there are obvious risks to taking an experimental drug of any kind, trials can be difficult in other ways as well.
Left in the Dark
A common complaint from many patients that are a part of a trial is that they often are kept in the dark about much of the information that is relevant to the trial in the first place. Patients are often never told what the results of a trial are; even if an individual patient may be experiencing benefit from an experimental drug, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the entire trial was a success. Understandably, patients want to know if their participation in the study was worthwhile. Drug makers often complain about how challenging it can be to fill the ranks of clinical trials, which can be especially challenging in rare diseases with a limited population of patients to choose from. Making the operations and results of trials more transparent and available to patients could help resolve this problem.
Trial participants will be invited to join the portal and will receive regular reminder and updates related to site visits and treatment administration. Patients will also be able to view their individual results at the end of the trial and will even have access to services to support any necessary travel.
The portal will also comply with newly issued standards in the EU and US that call for providing participants with plain language summaries of trial results and patient experience data.
