By Clinical Informatics News Staff

February 24, 2016 | MIAMI—The winners of the Clinical Informatics News Best Practices Awards were announced on Wednesday at the Summit for Clinical Ops Executives, SCOPE, in Miami, Fla. Prizes were awarded to Science 37 with LA BioMed, Massachusetts General Hospital and Prize4Life, and Clincierge.

The Clinical Informatics News Best Practices awards recognize outstanding examples of applied strategic innovation—partnerships, deployments, and collaborations that manifestly improve the clinical trial process. An expert panel of judges assessed entries looking for solutions that are innovative, and needed in the industry.

“This year’s entries again raised the bar on innovation in clinical trials,” said Allison Proffitt, Clinical Informatics News’ editorial director. “The clinical trials community and industry are so dedicated to improving the clinical trials process for the patients while upholding standards of excellence in drug development. It’s an exciting time.”

The judges named ten finalists, and from that pool chose winning entries in three categories: Clinical Data Intelligence; Study Startup and Design; and Patient Data Management.

Clinical Data Intelligence: Neurological Clinical Research Institute @ Massachusetts General Hospital and Prize4Life

The Pooled Resource Open-access ALS Clinical Trials (PRO-ACT) platform- Using Big Data to drive innovation in ALS Research

The vision of the Pooled Resource Open-access ALS Clinical Trials (PRO-ACT) platform project was to design and build an open access database that would contain the data from recent large ALS trials, and use them to drive innovation in ALS quantitative research a field hardly addressed before. Since its launch in 2012, the PRO-ACT platform had allowed the integration of 23 clinical trials with data from over 10,700 ALS patients, the largest in the world harmonized dataset from completed clinical trials in ALS with 11 diverse data types. The database has been successful in attracting over 1,000 researchers worldwide including several crucial collaborations and high impact publications. The database had enabled the running of two crowd-sourcing initiatives, bringing together over 13,000 participants and was part of several educational initiatives in several countries spanning over 500 students in Universities like Stanford University, Hebrew University and University of Zurich, and was “responsible” for several start-ups in bioinformatics. All these initiative served to bring together two disciplines that had limited intersection before- research on the biology of ALS and informatics research. This novel interdisciplinary field is now paving the ways to better understanding of ALS mechanisms, better ALS clinical trial and improved clinical care.

Study Startup and Design: Clincierge

Patient Recruitment, Support and Retention for Rare Disease Trial

Clincierge provided individual patient support services for a rare disease clinical trial, handling the logistics of travel, lodging, transportation and rapid reimbursement of patient out-of-pocket expenses. This included upfront payments of all costs associated with each clinical visit, at an average per-patient cost of $8,400, as well as managing all of the logistics, saving a total of 3500 hours or approximately 32 hours per patient. In order to support this global trial, Clincierge employed 17 Clincierges (“clinical concierge”) who collectively speak 20 Languages and support 18 countries.

Patient Data Management: Science 37 with LA BioMed

PEMPHIX Trial - Science 37 technology powering the LA Biomed telemedicine substudy site

Science 37 creates comfortable, convenient and connected clinical trial participation. On the PEMPHIX trial in partnership with LA BioMed, the nonprofit scientific research organization affiliated with the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Science 37’s demonstrated how its metasite model can fundamentally accelerate research. The PEMPHIX trial is being conducted at more than 60 sites worldwide, one of which is a telemedicine substudy site at LA BioMed powered by Science 37 technology. The Science 37 approach to this study was designed to accelerate the enrollment of patients with a rare disease by removing the geographic barriers to their participation in the research, and improving their experience of the research process by offering real-time access to the research team through our NORA technology.

Judges for the 2016 awards included Joe Kim, Eli Lilly; Nancy Mulligan, UBC; Beth Harper, Clinical Performance Partners; Craig Lipset, Pfizer; Stephen Fogelson, Develotron, LLC; and Jerry Schindler, Merck.