Greater use of electronic medical records could help pharma companies cut recruitment times for trials and reduce development costs.

Main Outcomes:

1. Use of patient data collected by healthcare systems can identify potential clinical trial participants more quickly and with better precision than traditional procedures.

Example: Dr Eriksson (pictured), a former senior director at Merck & Co, noted that a recent study by Parexel managed to knock 12 months off the estimated 24 month recruitment time.

2. Such efficiency has the potential to cut down research costs tremendously, with the price of getting a drug to market now well over the oft-quoted $1bn figure.

3. The use of electronic medical records – the medical history of a patient kept in a digital format – to support clinical trials has been encouraged by other prominent figures in healthcare, especially in the UK, which, in the NHS, has a healthcare system that covers the entire country.

4. Establishing EMR will attract new clinical studies across UK. 

5. Also, how use of this data can help, saying that researchers had the ability to use electronic medical records to accurately isolate a specific cohort of patients with a certain condition, and then run this cohort against patient profiles – such as demographic, age, gender, etc – to have representativeness in clinical trials.

6. Being a crucial development, said Dr Eriksson, considering that between 50 and 65 per cent of potential clinical trial participants fail at the screening stage because they are found not to meet one of the study's crtieria.

7. Ease of Market Access.

8. This protocol can then be used to run a report to find out where relevant patients are being treated and what patients are being treated by physicians registered as investigators, while electronic medical records can then be used to demonstrate suitable patients to investigators.

Drawbacks: 

One of the greatest burdens in using electronic medical records is uptake and compatibility among healthcare systems, which varies between different countries.

Alternates: 

This is changing, however, according to Dr Eriksson, who said that countries are now following the route of South Korea and Turkey who became the first two countries in the world to have a healthcare system with 100 per cent electronic medical records that are connected to each other and managed by a central office.

The situation is also improving in the US, where uptake has increased since President Barack Obama introduced an order that all healthcare providers need an electronic medical record system by 2014.

By 2020, I imagine the whole world will be using electronic medical records. Healthcare systems are also becoming more proactive in developing partnerships in clinical development, according to Dr Eriksson, who heads up a department at Parexel that is focused on building alliances between the CRO, industry and healthcare providers.

It is important to have partnership with healthcare and investigator networks to improve the services in the medical industry.