Articles
MedNet: Managing the Whole Trial
A ClinPage Interview with Timothy Pratt, PhD
Originally published on ClinPage.com on June 12, 2007
'Cleanest Data'
The company has a healthy business serving pharmaceutical companies of all sizes. But half of its business is from medical device manufacturers. MedNet, it turns out, has a certain virtuosity in corralling data from disparate devices, which may have different physiological applications or proprietary data formats coming off them.
Pratt clearly loves MedNet's complex projects. "It's the cleanest data in the world," he says of the information coming off medical devices. "It's never been touched by human hands. It's purely objective and nobody has messed with it. Medical devices offer you more capability to do really fancy things than you may necessarily do with a drug."
Merging Magic
In a project with pulmonary gas exchangers, MedNet figured out a way to take data from devices manufactured by eight different companies and put it into the same database. Every one of the eight formats was unique.
Better still, because the data had to be analyzed by experts, the system allowed the data to be reviewed in a normalized and consistent way across the trial. "This is all happening in a highly automated fashion," says Pratt. "If you've had to mail hard copies of this information to different investigators, you'd know how much of a problem that is."
The MedNet system is configured to generate to-do lists automatically, even for other organizations that are partnering to support a trial. That helps a project stay on track. "Everybody knows what they have to do, when they have to do it and when it's been done," says Pratt. "You can deal with it before it becomes a problem."
'Out Of Their Mind'?
As noted above, MedNet's solution encompasses clinical trial management, clinical data management (CDM) and project management, down to the level of institutional review board documents and payments to investigators.
Pratt doesn't think that any EDC system worth its salt should omit a clinical data management component. "I would not buy an eClinical solution that didn't have some form of CDM system embedded in it," he says. "Anyone who buys a standalone CDM system is out of their mind." EDC systems still lacking such functionality, he predicts, will be marginal or dormant products in the near future.
