Study Finds EHRs Can Hasten Drug Development

Published in Contemporary Clinical Trials, a cost-benefit study establishes that the revolutionary technological platform developed by the Electronic Health Records for Clinical Research (EHR4CR) project, cofunded by the European Commission and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), under the Innovative Medicines Initiative, would enhance and speed up clinical research processes, reduce trials timelines and costs, and generate significant added value for clinical trial sponsors.

Professor Georges De Moor, head of the medical informatics and statistics department at Ghent University, explains: "EHR4CR has developed a breakthrough European platform, InSite, that connects securely to the data within multiple hospital-based EHR systems and clinical data warehouses across Europe, to enable a trial sponsor to predict the number of eligible patients for a candidate clinical trial protocol, assess its feasibility, and locate the most relevant hospitals to recruit as trial centres."

Ariel Beresniak, CEO of Data Mining International, the Swiss research agency which performed this study, states: "Using an advanced methodology, for the first time, this robust cost-benefit study establishes that reusing hospital-based EHR data for clinical research would speed up drug development, increase efficiency, and generate substantial added value."

Mats Sundgren, EFPIA coordinator of the EHR4CR project, and principal scientist of global medicines development at AstraZeneca, declares: "These findings suggest that leveraging EHR data for clinical research provides global pharmaceutical industry with a game-changing opportunity, and new value-added solutions to enhance existing processes, reduce delays and costs, and deliver innovative medicines to patients faster. An early adoption program is planned with many European pharmaceutical leading companies."

Professor Dipak Kalra, president of EuroRec, announces: "The operational solutions using EHR4CR results, now being scaled up across Europe, will be presented to the scientific community at the inaugural conference of the European Institute for Innovation through Health Data on March 10, 2016, in Paris."

Source: Data Mining International