Exco InTouch Partners with Logos Technologies to Improve Patient Recruitment

London, UK-May 13, 2008-Exco InTouch (www.excointouch.com), the leading mobile messaging provider for the pharmaceutical industry, announces that it has partnered with London-based Logos Technologies (www.logostechnologies.com), experts in early phase EDC and Phase I site automation, to develop an integrated system which speeds up the patient recruitment process. The integration of Exco InTouch’s short messaging service (SMS) technology, ATLAS™, with ALPHADAS®, Logos Technologies’ proprietary electronic data capture (EDC) system, enables clinical trials sponsors and investigators to quickly identify, contact, and assess relevant patients for early phase studies.

The collaboration between Logos Technologies and Exco InTouch has been fuelled by the demand from sponsors for a seamless, fully integrated system for patient recruitment. The combination of these two industry-leading systems enables biopharmaceutical clients and study personnel to search for relevant patients in ALPHADAS and immediately communicate with selected patients via SMS using ATLAS. Patients are able to respond to certain questions using their own mobile phone, and these responses are sent directly to the ALPHADAS system, allowing recruitment staff to make immediate decisions regarding a patient’s eligibility to participate in a study. 

This fully integrated system also offers benefits for patients already enrolled on studies, as the ALPHADAS system enables sponsors and investigators to send protocol-specific questions, events or reminders to patients using ATLAS. Sponsor/patient interaction using Exco InTouch’s SMS technology has been proven to significantly improve patient compliance and retention throughout the life of a clinical study.

“Drug development companies are looking for faster access to data both for the recruitment process and during the life of a study,” says Tim Davis, co-founder of Exco InTouch. “The combination of using ALPHADAS to search for eligible patients and using ATLAS to communicate with and elicit responses from these patients enables sponsors to speed up recruitment drives, ultimately optimising product-to-market time.”

Giles Wilson, business and operations director for Logos Technologies, comments: “We understand that early phase clinical trials require a complete and fully integrated solution to deal with the common issues with patient recruitment. The integration of our ALPHADAS system with ATLAS from Exco InTouch offers sponsors and investigators a faster and more streamlined method of patient recruitment. Following this success, we are now looking into further system integration that will enable remote data capture via any mobile phone.”

ATLAS from Exco InTouch is a proprietary system on which SMS applications can be built, run, and integrated with a wide range of existing health care management systems. ATLAS technology is already used to create global, regulatory compliant messaging services for patient recruitment in a wide range of Phase I clinics. ALPHADAS from Logos Technologies is an early phase, Web-enabled EDC system and a clinical trial site automation tool which has been successfully used by life sciences organizations for more than a decade.