By Allison Proffitt

June 10, 2019 | CRF Bracket announced a new name and brand today. The company will now be known as Signant Health.

CRF Health and Bracket were joined in July 2018 when Genstar (the parent company of Bracket) acquired CRF Health. The company has been operating under the name CRF Bracket since then, though rumors of a rebrand were circulating at SCOPE this year.

Today, CEO Mike Nolte announced the new identity: Signant Health.

"The new Signant brand reflects our desire to help separate signal from noise at the intersection of science and technology and to never forget that our customers' significant work matters locally and globally," Nolte said in a Signant press release.

Rebranding is not a task to be taken lightly, Nolte joked last week on a call with Clinical Research News. "I'll try to avoid it in the future." But in this case, Nolte believes that a new name is, "more indicative of the kind of business we're trying to build." When the two companies first combined, Nolte explained, "we believed there was an opportunity to really differentiate around a very patient-centric strategy… We viewed that as a unifying strategy for bringing the businesses together that we though could be impactful right out of the gate."

Signant Health products and services don't yet reflect any major shifts from CRF Bracket. The new company website (signanthealth.com) still lists TrialConsent and TrialMax (from the CRF Health portfolio) and SmartSupplies and Rater Station (from Bracket). Products still address the needs of eCOA, eConsent, patient engagement, IRT, clinical supplies and endpoint quality.

But Nolte says the company is thinking differently about strategy and direction—and doing all of it in service of patients.

"We continue to invest in what we think is a market leading tool set for patient engagement, which came originally from mProve [which Bracket acquired in 2017], but we think is really the best in the industry. There are lots of unique ways to think about how you improve the interaction that somebody has with a site, or has individually [participating] in clinical research from the home," he says.

Nolte acknowledges that "patient centricity" gets tossed around far too easily, but says the Signant thought process is the real deal. "I've been a big advocate—even in other parts of the healthcare industry—for trying to keep things simple," Nolte told Clinical Research News. "It's really just helping think through what ought to be some simple ideas about how to manage a patient process and working with our customers to embed that in technology and logical workflow."

Nolte believes simple, effective tools are mutually beneficial for both the patient and other stakeholders. "We think it's actually good business, that there's a financial benefit in making the experience of the patient simpler. Look, I think where people get wrapped up sometimes is they try to think about it as a relationship…  I don't think anybody wants to have a deep relationship with a pharmaceutical company, and I don't think anybody wants to have a deep relationship in clinical research either."

Patients want simple, effective solutions, Nolte argues. "I think that's mutually beneficial for our customers because the more difficult it is to participate—the more impactful it is on somebody's life, the more complex the technology or the process is—the less likely somebody is going to stay in a trial."

Signant's goal, simply, is to make it easier to participate in—and run—clinical trials.

Nolte sees opportunities for improving the patient experience in research by building on and improving the workflows and capabilities of tools used at sites. For example, Rater Station, a legacy tool from Bracket, was designed for use in neuroscience. Signant is working to improve the time that it takes to deploy the solution as well as some of the unique workflows—in both cases, Nolte says, hoping to speed the process for the site staff sitting with a patient during a clinical visit.

Signant is also exploring new ways to leverage tools to simplify patients' experiences. For example, could eCOA serve as a hub in the patient's home as opposed to just a device to acquire data for a clinical outcomes assessment? Could Signant facilitate getting rides to the clinic for a visit? What opportunities are there for gamification and changing the interactions that trial participants have to make their participation more compelling?

"We're investing in device connectivity as a core strategy and thinking about the usefulness of those solutions in part to reduce the number of visits that somebody might have to have in the context of a clinical trial. So, if it takes 10 visits today and we can make three of those something that can be done remotely, then that reduces the burden on the site. It reduces the cost of the trial, and it makes the participation of a patient more simple," Nolte explains.

In Signant's view, technology should be a facilitator. "In some ways, if we do our job right, the technology becomes not intrusive," Nolte says. "It becomes something that runs in the background, drives effectiveness and helps support this idea of an effective and simple patient journey."