Oschner Health System, Lousiana’s largest non-profit academic healthcare system and Pfizer will work together as part of a multi-year strategic alliance to develop models to improve access and connectivity between patients and clinical trials. The alliance will leverage Oschner’s innovation lab, innovationOschner (iO), which uses technology and data to create patient-centered systems.
Participating patients will have the opportunity to test new digital tools created through the alliance to make the clinical trial experience more inclusive.
The companies also stated that participating research groups may incur lower costs while increasing capacity as the data collected will automatically be secured. The alliance will also use Oschner’s electronic health record (EHR) system which will reduce the amount of manual data entry required in a clinical trial.
To enable this type of automation and streamlining the companies will implement the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard which provides secure data exchange now used in most clinical trial apps.
The alliance between the companies began with a ‘proof of value’ phase in which researchers transferred mock data from Ochsner’s EHR system to Pfizer’s electronic data capture (EDC) system that is used for clinical trials. The companies aimed, to determine any variances between data collected in EHR and patient-reported data.
Rob Goodwin, vice president, Operations Center of Excellence, Global Product Development, told us that the 'proof of value' phase was established as the two companies agreed "that an essential part of digitizing clinical trials is establishing a seamless, secure model of electronic data transfer."
In its next phase, the alliance will transfer collected data for a real trial from one system to another. Goodwin said that the alliances value, "Ultimately, is that if you can run a clinical trial by collecting data in existing EHR systems, doctors can offer trial participation at the point of care, making trials more accessible to healthcare professionals and patients and more efficient for all stakeholders."
