June 28, 2017 | June was full of exciting news in the clinical trial and healthcare community, including partnerships and products from Medidata, Greenphire, dii, and more.

Boston Healthcare and Data Information Intelligence (dii) today announced a new partnership to develop and commercialize life sciences data and analytics for biopharmaceutical, medical device, and diagnostic companies. Boston Healthcare and dii will provide a joint offering for clients who need access to data and analytics across Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. The offering includes access to data from over 7,000 hospitals and labs, with a focus on detailed insights on installations from over 2,400 hospitals and labs, and clinical diagnostics testing volumes, trends, systems, and reagents used for Molecular and IVD tests in over 1,500 labs. Press release

Medidata and inVentiv Health announced a multi-year partnership to bring patient-centric technology and leading clinical trial expertise to the biopharmaceutical industry. The partnership will broaden the reach of Medidata’s industry-leading electronic informed consent (eConsent) technology, Medidata Enroll, to patients, sites and, biopharmaceutical clients worldwide. Press release

Translational Drug Development (TD2) and Deep 6 AI announced a formal agreement to work together in the fields of oncology and fibrosis to rapidly match eligible patients with appropriate clinical trials. The partnership grants TD2 access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence provided by Deep 6 AI, a company dedicated to finding patients for clinical trials. With the ability to analyze all structured and unstructured clinical data, including physician notes and pathology and genomic reports, Deep 6 AI’s system expedites the process of matching patients with new drug trials—finding suitable participants in minutes rather than the months it takes to manually review patient records. Press release

The Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) and Science Exchange announced the launch of ADDF ACCESS, a first-of-its-kind online platform designed to match scientists working on central nervous system (CNS) diseases with a vetted network of contract research organizations (CROs). ADDF ACCESS meets the unique needs of scientists in both academia and small biotech companies by combining the resources of Science Exchange, the world’s leading marketplace for outsourced research and development, with the Alzheimer’s drug discovery knowledge of the ADDF. Press release

Greenphire has established an Advisory Group for the growing CRO community. The goal of this group is to empower CROs to play a more active role in shaping the rapidly evolving payment automation market. The Global Healthcare CRO industry is expected to reach $45.2 billion by 2022, according to a new report by Grand View Research. As this market continues to expand, CROs are looking for ways to differentiate and gain a competitive edge. Technology that empowers CROs to attract and retain top performing sites while delivering more efficient services is critical in this competitive environment. The demands for payment automation are growing. Monthly payments, financial transparency, streamlined invoice management, and increasing global compliance standards are putting more pressure on CROs. Even if a CRO has assembled a dedicated payments team, technology is critical to optimizing and automating the fragmented and manual payment process. Press release

Nanobiotix has presented the results of the Phase I/II head and neck cancer trial with its lead product candidate, NBTXR3. Nanobiotix's Chief Medical Officer Elsa Borghi said: "The very good level of tolerance seen so far, the absence of Adverse Events related to the product, and the rate of Complete Response in this population, indicates that NBTRX3 could play a key role in the treatment of head and neck cancer. It could potentially have a direct impact on the patients' outcome via loco-regional control, quality of life, safety, and overall survival." Press release

Natural Language Processing (NLP) text analytics provider Linguamatics announced the implementation of the Linguamatics Health enterprise NLP platform, powered by I2E, at the University of Pennsylvania Health System for the extraction of actionable insights from unstructured patient data. The University of Pennsylvania Health System will leverage the Linguamatics Health platform to build queries and automatically mine clinical data from patient encounter records, specialist reports, and unstructured EHR notes. Specific use cases will include the identification of cohorts of patients with certain medical conditions and locating additional clinical annotations for the PennOmics system for translational research. Press release  

Cognizant, as part of its collaboration with TransCelerate BioPharma, announced new Shared Investigator Platform (SIP) capabilities that make it easier for clinical trial researchers to access, share and analyze data. SIP is a multi-tenanted, cloud-based, open architecture collaboration platform to support common research and clinical trial requirements for the biopharmaceutical industry. It brings together best of breed technologies from an eco-system of partners to streamline collaboration and provide a centralized point of access for trial sponsors, CROs, investigators, clinical researchers and ultimately regulators. By converging the work of multiple stakeholders, the SIP reduces the risks and complexity of clinical development, and significantly improves efficiency. Press release

CRF Health launched version 2 of TrialConsent, offering new enhancements to the industry’s first electronic informed consent solution with a fully embedded design tool. The solution promotes better comprehension, compliance, and retention rates while reducing regulatory risk. TrialConsent 2.0 marks a significant advance in electronic informed consent by offering an improved user interface with enhanced navigation for participants and site personnel. Sponsors, Institutional Review Boards, Ethics Committees and research sites also benefit from the improved collaboration offered by the solution and much simplified review process. Press release

Informa Pharma Intelligence announced the launch of its next generation of Citeline’s Sitetrove and Trialtrove solutions, as well as new application programming interfaces (APIs) for Trials and Drugs. The new solutions are designed to deliver unparalleled access to Citeline’s robust clinical trial intelligence with greater ease, speed and efficiency than ever before. The next generation of Trialtrove and Sitetrove provides users with the ability to go even deeper with search criteria to make better and more well-informed critical decisions, gain competitive advantage, save costs on and optimize ROI for their clinical trials. Press release

Teladoc announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Best Doctors, the world’s leading expert medical consultation company focused on improving health outcomes for the most complex, critical and costly medical issues. Teladoc is creating a new paradigm for how patients access care by delivering a powerful connected care platform – a single solution for addressing a complete spectrum of medical conditions, from non-critical, episodic needs to chronic, complicated medical conditions. By leveraging the proven portfolio of healthcare solutions from both Best Doctors and Teladoc, members will have one simple, virtual, patient-centric way to resolve their healthcare issues, improving outcomes and reducing costs. Press release

HealthFirst Financial has earned for the second time the prestigious Peer Review by HFMA designation, keeping the company on the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s Short List of “high value, high quality healthcare business solutions.” The only patient financing firm to ever earn the HFMA Peer Review designation for its affordable financing programs, HealthFirst Financial first qualified in 2014 and spent this past year undergoing the rigorous process to renew it. Just one in three companies makes it through the process and on to HFMA’s Short List. HealthFirst Financial patient financing programs are available at more than 220 facilities across the United States, including Trinity Health System in 22 states. With payment programs offering no or low-interest credit lines up to 60 months, HealthFirst Financial makes it possible for patients to afford needed care without breaking their family budgets and for providers to receive immediate payment for their medical services, improving cash flow, revenues and liquidity. Press release

MatrixCare announced that it has acquired SigmaCare, a leading EHR vendor for the long-term, post-acute care market, based in Manhattan. MatrixCare’s innovation-driven strategy and CareCommunity care coordination and population health management platform are based on a commitment to interoperability that allows the company to seamlessly integrate care-setting specific data from MatrixCare and non-MatrixCare sources, including over 500 telehealth devices, into one e-longitudinal personal health record for managing the health and wellness of US seniors. SigmaCare customers will immediately be able to take advantage of MatrixCare’s full solution set including CareCommunity, Revenue Cycle Management, and MatrixCare Analytics to help their organizations deliver superior care, maximize reimbursements, reduce readmissions, maintain high occupancy, facilitate interoperability across the spectrum of care, and support executive decision making. At the same time, MatrixCare is committed to minimizing disruption to current SigmaCare customers and will maintain and support key existing SigmaCare products for a period of five years. Press release

Direct Recruiters, Inc. (DRI), Executive Search has announced that Walter Groszewski has joined them as the Director of Client Partnerships, Healthcare IT & Life Sciences. Walter has over thirty-two years of experience in Business and Information Technology and over twenty of those years have been spent in the Healthcare and Life Sciences marketplaces where he held several leadership positions.  He has an extensive background in cultivating deep client relationships and delivering impactful and measurable results to his clients as well as experience evaluating, starting and managing new businesses in Healthcare. Press release

Slope is providing data-driven, automated services that customers say reduce costs and increase operational efficiency. Artificial intelligence and machine learning is often touted as the “next big thing” on the horizon in healthcare. Slope is bringing machine learning algorithms to power supply chains for clinical trials today. The company provides automated and comprehensive, integrated services for clinical trial supplies for CROs and pharmaceutical and biotechnology sponsors. Oncology CRO Cancer Insight’s focus is discovering, developing and testing emerging immunotherapy biotechnologies. The CRO was growing quickly and busy coordinating the supply needs of four complex Phase II trials actively enrolling patients at more than 50 study sites. Conventional practices for supplying trials meant that sites are too often oversupplied with items that will expire if not properly managed and require too much space for storage. Cancer Insight realized that study sites, focused on treating patients, also were struggling with clinical supply coordination. Press release