February 21, 2018 | The 9^th annual Summit for Clinical Ops Executives (SCOPE) took place last week in Orlando, Florida, bringing together members of the clinical trial and healthcare industries to share new ideas and innovations seeking to propel the industry forward. In addition to the conference tracks, awards ceremonies, and Expo Hall buzz, several companies took the opportunity to launch new products and announce recent appointments. Here are a few of the exciting things seen and heard on the show floor.

MDCPartners presented their two latest innovative designs to the public: ta-Scan Podium and InterSect. Podium is an online tablet application for Clinical Ops, Medical Affairs teams, and Medical Science Liaisons that enables users to find full profiles of all relevant Key Opinion Leaders and Key External Experts. InterSect is a desktop application that interfaces with the entire ta-Scan database on a semantic level. This unique query tool allows users to overlap internal data with the ta-Scan database and match and correlate the data in the system.

Both new innovative technologies are based on the organization's well-known clinical business intelligence solution ta-Scan and its Semantic Search System. The patented Trial Cloud and web mining software of ta-Scan, which is the largest semantically linked clinical database available on the web, combined with its powerful search capabilities, allow users to quickly find and analyze clinical data from multiple global public sources. The delivery of in-depth and clear insights into any data point in the database is what classifies these tools as digital innovations.

Where MDCPartners' focus in the previous years was more on the introduction of new features and developments, this year it has shifted to more personalized solutions, with new modules being completely customizable to integrate private data.

TriNetX has developed a chemotherapy lines of treatment identification algorithm that understands treatment patterns to deduce the line of chemotherapy treatment a patient is undergoing. This information, difficult to obtain automatically, is critical for biopharmaceutical companies striving to develop therapies for patients involved in care regimens beyond first line treatments.

Chemotherapy lines of treatment is the newest component of the industry-leading platform TriNetX has built to help researchers develop effective oncology clinical trial protocols and identify eligible patients. TriNetX is providing access to seamlessly integrated data from EMRs, tumor registries, unstructured pathology reports using natural language processing, and molecular genomics data. The TriNetX platform also predicts how many new patients will become eligible for a clinical trial in the next 12 months on a site by site basis. 

Network members use TriNetX’s cloud-based, health research platform to analyze patient populations and perform “what-if” analyses in real-time. As members, healthcare organizations receive hardware and software that are configured within the organization’s IT infrastructure and often builds on existing data resources such as i2b2 and Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP). Researchers then have access to the institution’s de-identified patient data through a user-friendly interface and a growing number of visualization and analysis capabilities.

Biopharmaceutical companies and CROs are presented with aggregate views, but each data point in the TriNetX network can be traced to healthcare organizations who have the ability to identify individual patients. This enables clinical researchers to develop virtual patient cohorts that can then be re-identified for potential recruitment into a clinical trial.

Bracket announced the appointment of Michael P. Nolte as Chief Executive Officer. The company’s current CEO, Jeff Kinell, will remain on the Bracket Board of Directors as a strategic advisor.

Mike Nolte is a seasoned industry leader who joins Bracket after serving as the Chief Executive Officer of Influence Health, where he led the strategy and delivery for the Consumer Experience Platform, supporting consumer-centric, digital healthcare. With a career spent at the intersection of healthcare, technology and service delivery, Nolte’s breadth of experience, strategic insight and proven track record align well with Bracket’s goals as it continues to invest in science-based, clinical development technology, and service solutions.

Prior to Influence Health, Mike served as the President and COO of MedAssets and spent 7 years at GE, where he led GE’s Healthcare IT Service Business in the Americas, served as the GM of GE’s Enterprise Revenue Cycle Business and led business transformation activities for GE’s Chief Information Officer. Mike’s early career included five years with McKinsey & Company and six years as a U.S. Army Officer.

Certara announced the launch of version 10 of D360, its data informatics platform for discovery scientists. D360 is a self-service data access, integration, and visualization solution used to query diverse cheminformatics and bioinformatics data sources to make informed go/no-go research decisions. The new visualization features in D360 v10 include the ability to chart chemical structures for direct structure-activity display, conduct subset analysis to segment and understand data (trellising), and plot complex, multi-value per record data. These visualization capabilities allow scientists to make sense of the data at a glance so that they can make informed decisions quickly. Scientists can also easily display threshold and correlations on plots with user-defined lines.

In addition to upgraded visualization, D360 v10 offers new data presentation capabilities. D360 can now turn complex raw data into a simple view by grouping results obtained under scientifically-equivalent conditions. D360 also provides data quality and quantity indicators, allowing users to immediately assess the quality of a data point based on the nature of underlying, individual experimental results.

In December, Clinerion joined HealthCarePoint (HCP)’s BlueCloud Network. Members of the BlueCloud Sponsor Network will now be able to view the locations and numbers of Clinerion’s patients on a dynamic map. Drill-downs allow the user to narrow the selection by therapeutic area and indication. Clinerion is expanding its global coverage rapidly and will keep the patient map up-to-date. Clinerion’s Patient Recruitment System (PRS) queries hospital electronic patient health records to offer patient search and identification for clinical trials, as well as report generation for real-world evidence and market access analyses. PRS uses Clinerion’s proprietary “Anonymized Identification” technology, which ensures patient privacy by performing patient search and identification from fully anonymized records.

Strategikon Pharma announced the release of the Sponsor Edition of the Clinical Maestro platform. Clinical Maestro is a new offering that models operational and cost scenarios, forecasting, selecting, and managing clinical service providers and clinical contracts. Increased complexity and pressure for speed necessitates that clinical study teams base forward-looking decisions on data, rather than instinct. Clinical Maestro transforms processes for long-range planning, budgeting, procurement, contracting and vendor management with an end-to-end platform specifically created to support these functions. The result is unprecedented speed, precision and visibility that increases the efficiency and lowers the cost of running clinical trials.