PatientsLikeMe, the US-based online platform for the exchange of health data, has announced its second initiative in less than a week to leverage its patient community into better access, enrolment and retention for clinical trials.
This time the company has teamed up with healthcare marketing and patient recruitment specialist BBK Worldwide to offer joint services to pharmaceutical companies and other industry stakeholders that want to improve patient recruitment and retention for ongoing or upcoming clinical studies.
The new allies will underpin the initiative with national and regional multi-media campaigns in the US, encouraging people to sign up with PatientsLikeMe and join an existing community of more than 100,000 patients with over 500 conditions.
BBK and PatientsLikeMe will offer industry partners tiered access to interested patient members who meet these companies’ clinical trial criteria. Sponsors will also be able to leverage the PatientsLikeMe platform, as well as BBK’s technological solutions and communications expertise, to establish “powerful retention programmes”, the companies said.
The announcement comes hard on the heels of a new PatientsLikeMe feature that includes a daily update of all study information on ClinicalTrials.gov, the public online registry run by the US National Institutes of Health. It also offers automatic matching of PatientsLikeMe members with any clinical trial they may be eligible for.
Strong synergy
Based in Newton, Massachusetts, BBK employs innovative strategies, programmes and technologies to streamline the patient enrolment process in clinical trials. Founder and chief executive officer Joan Bachenheimer underlined the strong synergy between the company’s operations and the PatientsLikeMe set-up.
“With our leading clinical trial solutions and PatientsLikeMe’s unparallelled patient engagement platform, we’ll be able to create a steady stream of interested and eligible clinical trial participants for clients with the greatest depth of members’ health information in the industry,” Bachenheimer claimed.
David Williams, chief marketing Officer of PatientsLikeMe, said the alliance was “a crucial next step in bringing exposure of clinical trials to our members, beyond just giving them access to ClinicalTrials.gov listings on our site”.
By partnering with BBK, “an established leader in the space”, the company can now “reach many more patients to let them know about potential clinical opportunities that address their specific, unmet medical needs”, he added. .
