Bridging Trials Closer to Patients

Next week, I will be presenting at the Bridging Clinical Research & Clinical Health Care Collaborative. The presentation evolved from a survey we conducted with SCORR Marketing to follow up on the ideas that came out of the first Bridging conference last year. This Bridging Research and Clinical Care article highlights the results.

As I noted in that September article, “The inherent flaw with this survey, of course, is that it was only distributed to a clinical trials audience. Therefore, there would be a bias toward the interests and ideas related to this industry vs. healthcare.” With the help of our sister publications that cover business and therapeutic-specific areas for practicing physicians, we deployed a survey around their views on clinical research.

While the surveys were not one-to-one, meaning not all of the questions and answers were listed in the same way or contained the same choices, they did offer some compelling views.

Here are some one-to-ones for the clinical research (CR) and clinical care (CC) respondents:

• 43% CR have an initiative to increase collaboration between healthcare and research; while 19% of CC do.

• 35.5% of CR vs. 57% of CC believe the primary benefit to increasing collaboration between clinical research and healthcare is greater access to clinical trials/research as a care option

• 60% of CC believe the Physician practices/networks are least likely to work on integrating clinical research and healthcare vs. 21% of CR.

But even with the challenges, I was encouraged by the profile of the healthcare respondents and responses that were positive around the potential for integration. That clinical care audience reflected the following:

• 63% were physicians

• 94% interact with patients on a daily basis

• 93% are familiar with clinical trials and how they are conducted

• 85% would use their EHR/EMRs to flag potential clinical trial for their patient, if it had that capability

• 31% of respondents already have a physician referral system in place to offer potential patients into trials

And best of all was that 74% of respondents would be interested to learn more about clinical research as a care option.

I’m looking forward to the conversation at the conference, as well as keeping the dialogue going through our website and pages.

Lisa Henderson is Editor-in-Chief of Applied Clinical Trials. She can be reached at [email protected]. Follow Lisa on Twitter: @trialsonline