October 17, 2018 | BARCELONA—The winner of the inaugural Clinical Informatics News European Innovation Award was announced on Wednesday at the Summit for Clinical Ops Executives (SCOPE)-Europe in Barcelona, Spain. The prize was awarded to Custodix for their InSite platform.

The European Innovation Awards program seeks to recognize outstanding examples of applied strategic innovation—partnerships, deployments, and collaborations that manifestly improve the clinical trial process.

“Our goal in creating this new award is to recognize the projects that raise the bar on innovation in clinical trials,” said Allison Proffitt, Clinical Informatics News’ Editorial Director. “This year’s competitive field of entries further proves the dedication of our community and industry to improving the clinical trials process for both patients and researchers.”

This year’s winner, Custodix, is honored for their InSite platform, which enables the secure reuse of EHR data in clinical research.

“Patient recruitment is one of the primary bottlenecks in the clinical trial process,” Custodix wrote in their entry form. “Traditionally, it is hampered by ineffective communication between sponsors and sites, and a lack of data-driven insight in the patient population.”

InSite addresses these challenges by establishing a new communication path between hospitals and researchers, and enabling the secure reuse of EHR data in clinical research. Using InSite, the patient recruitment process is vastly improved, the company believes.

Based on anonymized and aggregated real-world patient data, trial sponsors get immediate feedback on the effect of inclusion and exclusion criteria on a study’s recruitment potential in a HIPAA and GDPR-compliant way. This results in high-quality protocols and limits the need for costly amendments in later stages.

Judges for the 2018 awards included Silke Strommenger, Bayer AG; Phillips Kuhl and Micah Lieberman, Cambridge Healthtech Institute; Allison Proffitt and Ben Ross, Clinical Informatics News; and other industry experts.