EURECA is a platform to enable a stronger connection between the clinical care and clinical research settings through seamless, secure, scalable, and consistent information sharing between the currently disparate electronic health record (EHR) systems and clinical research information systems. This will allow both clinical care to more readily incorporate the latest research results and clinical research to access the wealth of real life clinical care data. Further, it will make the process simpler and create opportunities for patients to participate in clinical trials and potentially benefit from access to the latest treatments.
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Philips, as leading partner of EURECA and a large player in the healthcare, continually expands its portfolio of services and products in the medical domain including those for clinical decision support. Yakobo, as a clinical trial recruitment tool, will flesh out the clinical decision support portfolio Philips is currently researching and developing for cancer care pathways.
Enrollment in clinical trials is thought to improve the standard of care for those participating in a clinical trial, as well as, and perhaps more importantly, it is thought to further research and impact and improve the quality of future standard treatment. However, enrollment in adult oncology clinical trials is generally quite low (3-5%) (National Cancer Institute, 2012). This is in sharp contrast to pediatric oncology where it is commonly standard practice to enroll patients in clinical trials (60% – nearly 100%). In pediatric oncology the 5 year survival rate has increased drastically in the last 20 years (from 30% to 80%) (Downs-Canner & Shaw, 2009) due in part to the effective enrollment of patients into clinical trials. In contrast, due to the low enrollment rate in adult oncology, research is slowed. The timeline for some clinical studies has to be extended to achieve enrollment rates (to get statistical significance). Other studies, in fact, simply do not get enough patients, and thus may have collected data and spent the significant amount of money to do so and cannot use the results for research.
Yakobo: a clinical trial recruitment tool is one of the first if not the first tool that allows you to quickly visually filter through patient data in an EHR (or any EURECA enabled database) based on the enrollment (eligibility) criteria for clinical trials and begin connecting with potential patient candidates through the appropriate channels.
Currently clinical trial recruitment is done with a minimal or adhoc usage of the information in EHRs. In fact there are several large companies that specialize in clinical trial recruitment that have elaborate recruitment strategies that work outside of the medical system (Clariness Patient Recruitment, 2013). However Yakobo through EURECA works with the medical system directly empowering the medical community to make clinical trial participation a natural part of clinical care.