March 31, 2017 | News, products, and partnerships from around the clinical trial and healthcare community including news from CluePoints, PAREXEL, goBalto, and more. 

Donald Rucker, who previously served as Siemens Healthcare's vice president and chief medical officer, will serve as the next head of the HHS' Office of National of Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), the agency's newly updated directory shows. He currently serves as a professor of clinical emergency medicine and biomedical informatics at Ohio State University. The update to the HHS directory comes just as the healthcare industry was questioning whether the position would remain or be eliminated. Earlier this month, HHS Secretary Tom Price named former Louisiana congressman John Fleming to be the deputy assistant secretary for health technology – a new position within the agency. Fleming will now report to the new ONC head. Read more at HealthcareDIVE and FierceHealth

PAREXEL announced the launch of its patient sensor solution, a new offering that securely captures, transmits, stores, and visualizes study subject data in clinical trials. PAREXEL’s offering, powered by the Perceptive MyTrialsAnalytics platform, enables an end-to-end services and technology solution that facilitates the remote collection of study subject data via medical devices. Collection of clinical data via wearables and sensors could replace or reduce the number of clinical assessments and/or on-site visits during clinical trials. This could potentially reduce the burden on trial participants and sites as well as decrease trial costs. Wearable monitoring solutions also allow data to be collected more often. Frequent collection of this data can provide real-time meaningful insights into a study subject’s behavior and health outside of visits, supporting better compliance and real-time user feedback. Press release

goBalto announced results from its ongoing partnership with INC Research, a leading global CRO and pioneer in the implementation of goBalto’s end-to-end study startup platform to accelerate delivery of Phase I to IV clinical trials for global biopharmaceutical customers. INC Research continues to optimize its clinical study startup process on a worldwide basis, leveraging goBalto’s technology to start more than 220 studies in more than 68 countries to date. “As one of the significant support technologies for our Trusted Process trial management methodology, goBalto is integrated into INC’s ecosystem and provides detailed visibility into the status of our site-based activities; improving operational delivery that leverages actionable data,” wrote Jonathan Shough, Chief Information Officer, INC Research. “goBalto assists us in combining process improvements with broad integrations, a strategy that leverages ‘best of breed’ applications in the eClinical stack to realize gains in operational efficiencies, ultimately resulting in shorter timelines and cost savings for our customers.” Benefiting from goBalto Activate’s robust library of country-specific workflows and management-based approach to site activation, INC Research initiates and manages thousands of investigational sites on a global basis per year. With its employees leveraging the Activate system worldwide, INC Research manages small to large complex studies ranging from a single country to up to 40 or more. Press release

CluePoints, who recently won a Clinical Informatics News Best Practices Award in Clinical Data Intelligence, has introduced Patient Profiles to its rapidly expanding platform. The powerful combination of Patient Profile reports, guided by CluePoints’ advanced central statistical monitoring, offers a new way for clinical teams to prioritize the investigation of atypical patients in clinical trials. Patient Profiles provides detailed insight into patient experiences and offers a more targeted approach by identifying anomalies in data and ranking patients by their relative degree of atypicality. The highly configurable Patient Profiles solution presents a rich set of customizable visualization options, including the ability to visually assess a chronological view of a patient’s visit, investigational product exposure, adverse events and concomitant medications – along with any additional relevant patient information. The solution will help to enhance overall quality management, guiding study teams to quickly and effectively characterize risk signals and enable centralized medical and safety reviews within the CluePoints platform. Press release 

LabNetwork, WuXi AppTec’s global chemistry ecommerce platform company, announced a new collaboration with Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. LabNetwork’s nearly four million commercially available discovery and research compounds will now be directly available to users of Reaxys, Elsevier’s premier chemistry database. The enhanced functionality means chemical companies and researchers, while using Reaxys, will also have access to both LabNetwork product availability and price information as a standard feature. The implementation deepens WuXi’s integration with chemists’ research and discovery workflows and expands exposure to WuXi ecommerce through LabNetwork. Through the integration chemical companies and researchers can now enjoy product quality assurance that is guaranteed by WuXi, greater transparency over supply chains, and lower costs for a range of vital compounds on Reaxys. Researchers will also reap the advantages of a wider selection as LabNetwork sources compounds from more than 2,000 suppliers across the globe. Finally, the integration means that researchers will be able to easily compare the cost of buying a compound versus making it internally, allowing them to save time, accelerate research and better allocate budget resources. Press release

Colpitts Clinical Trial Travel has announced that it will manage travel services for its 500th clinical trial this month. The company, a division of Direct Travel, was among the first in the United States and Europe to offer travel management services specifically for clinical trials and their sponsors, and to have a division of specially certified travel experts dedicated to clinical services. Clinical trial travel involves a host of logistical challenges that are different from any other type of travel, as Colpitts has learned first-hand over the past 15 years. The experience of servicing 500 trials has given Colpitts clinical team invaluable insight and expertise in common clinical trial travel needs, including air ambulance transportation, translator services, and accommodations for entire families that must relocate in order to participate in a trial - with minimal disruption to their everyday lifestyle. Colpitts clinical clients conduct a wide array of research to help discover treatments and cures for commonplace and rare health conditions. This type of environment necessitates a high level of privacy for both company and patient information, and all of these factors have led Colpitts to be innovative in its clinical offerings. Tools such as a HIPAA-compliant clinical portal and reloadable MasterCards for patient expenses have made significant progress toward reducing the logistical burden for trial sponsors and CROs. Press release

ProductLife Group (PLG) has launched PLG inVolv, a powerful artificial-intelligence-based social media listening solution to help the industry meet its pharmacovigilance obligations. As the latest addition to ProductLife Group’s leading pharmacovigilance and risk management services offerings and designed to complement rather than replace existing product vigilance and clinical safety systems, this new and innovative solution is the result of an exclusive collaboration with Volv Partners, a specialist in artificial-intelligence-based social media listening technology for life sciences and medical markets. A major strength is the tool’s rapid impact and sharp focus. PLG inVolv is easy to deploy as either a hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscription or a complete managed service, and it’s programmed to learn what to look out for, so time and budget don’t get lost in an analysis of irrelevant social noise. “PLG inVolv makes sophisticated social listening easy and convenient by using preloaded algorithms and machine-learning technology that enables high-targeting analytics of Web and social media activity,” said Adam Sherlock, CEO of ProductLife Group, in a statement. “In this way, it cost-efficiently meets the latest regulatory requirements around the de-risking of product use and around increases in patient centricity.” Press release

CROS NT announced the acquisition of the clinical division of PM Clinical Limited, a sister company under the PM Holding entity currently based in the United Kingdom and Italy. The move expands CROS NT's service offerings by adding regulatory consultancy, study design, feasibility, clinical project management and monitoring. The acquisition shifts CROS NT from a biometrics-only CRO to a niche provider of data expertise combined with clinical excellence to now being able to offer a full-service approach. Press release