Are you reading this blog on your smartphone? If so, you are not alone. A recent report estimates that nearly 55% of Americans not only text, email and communicate with their phones but they get their news there as well.
These statistics indicate that smartphones are an integral part of our everyday lives as people discover new ways to use technology to save time and improve their quality of life.
A recent article touches on an as yet untapped possibility for smartphone utilization, clinical drug trials. Such drug trials are dependent on accurate reporting from participants on a broad range of requirements. Traditionally, this is accomplished through lengthy facility visits and memory recall or handwritten notes.
These methods are not only labor intensive for administrators and participants but also can yield less than accurate results. Could smartphone use increase accuracy and ease the burden of the trials overall?
The answer is a resounding yes.
The article, released by MedGadget, chronicles the ways that reporting results from clinical trials in real time via devices will improve the system overall.
Get Real Health found this out first-hand through a solution it developed 5 years ago for Kaiser Permanente which allowed patients to record results remotely. The success of that project was one of the catalysts that led to the birth of our InstantPHR platform to bring readings, medication data and patient health profiles to life.
InstantPHR, when deployed as a mobile app, is highly effective for this branch of the medical field. Specifically, InstantPHR addresses the issue of data integrity which, according to the article, plagues clinical trials overall. With smartphone in hand, participants can relay information to be captured immediately by administrators. No memory recall or notes necessary.
Additionally, InstantPHR can enable subjects to participate safely and fully in drug trials. Troublesome patterns can be detected immediately as opposed to delayed identification at the next scheduled appointment. Casting a wider net for participants through such technology means those who qualify won’t miss the opportunity to engage in a clinical trial should they choose to do so.
Get Real Health’s Senior Clinical Strategist, Jennifer Dunphy agrees saying, “One of my biggest frustrations as a clinical research nurse for over 25 years has been the difficulty of collecting accurate at home reporting of symptoms and adverse events from patients between visits and the frequency of appointments necessary to monitor patients. For years I have believed that there has to be a tool available to help with these problems. Using InstantPHR not only makes it easy for patients to record adverse events and subsequently report those adversities to clinicians in real time but in most cases remote patient monitoring decreases the frequency of doctor’s visits.”
Most importantly, the cost of a drug trial could be significantly decreased through smartphone app use. Not only does the cost of overhead decrease due to cutting actual clinician appointments and face-to-face interaction, but participants are less taxed as well opening the door to lower study compensation.
Dunphy concurs, “With the ability to capture a robust data picture in real time, that data will then be analyzed quickly and could potentially get vital drugs to market faster and at a lower cost.”
Read the full article here»
