March 16, 2015 | While the sessions at SCOPE were packed, there was quite a bit going on in the exhibit hall as well. Clinical Informatics News wasn’t able to visit every exhibitor, but here are some of the updates and product announcements we picked up on site.

AiCure 

AiCure CEO Adam Hanina tells the story of a clinical trial site doing some landscaping. When a thick hedge was removed from under the windows, the landscapers found thousands of pills—dumped medication that someone was supposed to have taken. AiCure’s artificial intelligence platform aims to ensure that doesn’t happen. The software can be deployed on a smart phone, and can be used to confirm that study participants in phase 2-4 studies are taking their medication. There are lots of reasons a patient might not, Hanina explained. Maybe they just want the study payment; maybe they are self-managing side effects; maybe they think it’s ok to adjust their dose; maybe they quit taking the medication because they don’t think it’s helping. For whatever reason, it’s important to know who is taking the drug.

AiCure has been used in five trials so far, and Hanina expects upcoming projects to bring the total to several thousand patients. The software is modular, so it can be implemented easily for different protocols including trials that might be more challenging: for pediatric patients, the elderly, or patients who are mentally ill.

The software works with artificial intelligence algorithms, not simple video. Any video that is stored is blurred and encrypted, so no personal health information is at risk, Hanina explained.

Exostar 

At the Exostar booth, Exostar and DocuSign were presenting their new collaborative solution. DocuSign’s DTM platform and eSignature solution have been integrated into Exostar’s Life Sciences Identity Hub. The partnership is meant to help organizations transition to a 100% digital environment.

“Our partnership with DocuSign lets organizations and individuals in our life science and healthcare community access DocuSign’s one account, one login eSignature solution,” said Daniel Pfeifle, Exostar’s vice president of sales and marketing. “DocuSign’s solution perfectly complements the one account, one credential, single sign-on user experience of our Life Sciences Identity Hub. As a result, Exostar community members now can DocuSign documents seamlessly, securely, and compliantly—anytime, anywhere, on any device—to truly unleash the power of collaboration across organizational and geographic boundaries.”

GoBalto 

GoBalto has undergone quite a bit of growth since Sujay Jadhav took the reigns as CEO in November 2013. GoBalto spent 2014 enhancing its products, automating processes, and investing in customer support and infrastructure, Jadhav told us. The hard work paid off; the company’s customers have doubled, and the platform’s use has increased five-fold.

The company just launched an updated version of its study startup product, Activate. The new release of Activate focuses on enhanced document management, business process improvement, and alerting—the 80% of key activities and milestones not reflected in traditional eTMF and document management systems.

Jadhav plans to “productize everything,” he said. Currently, studies can be up and running in a week for new clients, and existing clients can add studies within a few hours. Several customers—Jadhav mentioned ICON in particular—have adopted Activate enterprise-wide.

Even with such a strong year behind him, Jadhav doesn’t look to slow down. In January of this year, the company raised another $12 million in funding. Jadhav said that with those funds he plans to scale customer support and global infrastructure, invest some in marketing, and invest in product engineering, looking to move GoBalto “a little bit more into the feasibility space.” The core business is funding itself, he said, so the extra cash could also go toward small, niche acquisitions.

Parallax Online 

For all that technology can automate for clinical trials, there remains the patients and the site staff that work them. One of the finalists in the Clinical Informatics New Best Practices competition, Parallax Online is working to smooth that interaction with excellent training. Parallax brings a unique mix of technology, extensive clinical trial experience, instructional design and new media applications to clinical trial and other study-related training.

Parallax has found that their solution offers direct operational cost reductions that can be as high as 80% over traditional methods. Students can pace themselves, and take assessments along the way. Most interestingly, the solution offers students a virtual patient to work with at the end of the process, rather than experiment with real patients that have been painstakingly recruited.

Comprehend Clinical 

When much of the conversation at SCOPE turned to innovation, Rick  Morrison, CEO of Comprehend Clinical, was frank. I don’t think innovation is coming from Oracle, CROs, Medidata, or Accenture,” he said. “Real innovation comes through smaller [groups], unencumbered by existing business models.” At Comprehend, Morrison’s focus is on aligning his model with his customers’ needs, to help them understand their business better and conduct trials faster.

Comprehend’s cloud platform is vendor-neutral, and aims to help sponsors understand their trial landscape, giving tools to help understand study startup metrics, protocol deviations, and patient behavior. It’s a needed shift, Morrison said, to a data-driven approach.

We need more drugs available, and we need to understand them better. Holding patients’ hands is nice, Morrison said, but we need to arm everyone with better tools to make better decisions. He recounts stories of clinical scientists who wait a month for a PDF report on an on-going trial.

But the landscape is changing. Morrison believes that within five years, the industry will look different. By arming everyone with better tools to make more data-driven decisions, he said, everyone will win.

ePharmaSolutions 

Of the three winners of the Clinical Informatics News Best Practices Award, one group was on hand to pick up their trophy in person. ePharmaSolutions won the Patient Data Management award.  

Over the last year, ePharmaSolutions has deployed the SitePortal on over 60 studies with leading professional research sites to understand whether moving to a paperless clinical trial environment could have an impact on site performance. The first beta site, Raleigh Neurology Associates (RNA), has been comparing coordinator time and productivity before and after the use of the SitePortal. During the first 9 months of 2014, RNA reported a 30% improvement in study coordinator productivity and a 25% improvement in overall enrollment for studies that used the SitePortal vs those studies that did not.