Datatrak makes a good Find

Datatrak's $18m (€15m) acquisition of ClickFind fulfills the company's strategy of offering the broadest multi-component eClinical capability in the clinical trials market.

Until the acquisition, Datatrak provided electronic data capture (EDC) software for clinical trials, however, its product suite did not contain the full range of components necessary to remain competitive in the evolving eClinical market.

"As this global clinical trial market transitions from manual methods to technology-enabled processes, more complete functionalities will be required by our customers. Preferably, these functionalities need to exist in one architecture and be available with a single service provider in order to make contracting simpler," said Dr. Jeffrey Green, President and CEO of Datatrak.

"With this in mind, our advancement into a complete eClinical suite of capabilities has been an internal strategic direction of Datatrak for the past several years," he said.

When faced with a 'build versus buy' scenario, the company decided to buy and offer an entire eClinical platform immediately instead of taking longer, missing market opportunities and consuming capital from building each component internally.

"The eClinical market will be larger than the EDC market alone and we want to seize this opportunity," said Green.

In addition to expanding its product capabilities, the company expects the acquisition to significantly increase its customer base.

ClickFind brings 15 new clinical trial sponsors and relationships with 10 contract research organisations (CROs) to Datatrak. The active number of ongoing clinical trials with the combined companies is 100 and the combined client base now totals 47.

The new product suite will be branded as DATATRAK eClinical and offers several new capabilities that the company believes will start bringing in new revenue.

The architecture is flexible enough to support electronic-or paper-based clinical trials and also contains functionalities supporting EDC, traditional data management activities, interactive voice response systems (IVRS), voice and web randomisation, medical coding, clinical trial management systems (CTMS), core laboratory digitized electrocardiograms and image processing; drug inventory management, electronic patient-recorded outcomes (ePRO) and workgroup collaboration and workflow management platforms.

In addition, it offers multilingual capabilities including double-byte characters, such as Kanji languages, to fully support the Japanese, Chinese and Korean markets - areas where the company plans to particularly capitalise on.