The Medical Research Network (MRN), which provides home-healthcare and site-support services to boost patient recruitment and optimise subject retention in clinical trials, says the UK-based business has seen “phenomenal” growth since it started up in late 2006.
Revenues expanded by 533% in the first five years of operation and current forecasts point to a further increase of 170% by the end of this financial year, making the MRN the world’s leading global provider of home healthcare for patients in clinical trials, it notes. Staff numbers over the same period have risen nearly five-fold.
With 28 full-time employees and a number of contract staff supporting headquarters functions, as well as “hundreds” of nurses delivering MRN services across four continents (including a North American operation), the company plans to continue expanding over the coming months, bringing its Home Trial Support and Site Nurse Support offerings to a global audience.
Support, service, staff
Chief executive officer Dr Graham Wylie, who led the management buy-out of the MRN from Healthcare at Home – at the time, he was managing director of Healthcare at Home’s Clinical Trials Division – puts the company’s successful trajectory down to service, support and “above all” staff.
Growth has been “driven by our commitment to meeting the needs of customers as they explore the benefits of MRN’s services, requesting we work in more and more countries with increasingly large projects,” Wylie comments.
Customers using the MRN services “continually” see improvements in the recruitment and retention of patients for their trials – “two of the major challenges in clinical research today”, he points out.
“Our ability to take the trial to the patient makes participation more convenient and appealing and boosts recruitment rates by over 60% even in the simplest of trials.”
Lightening the trial’s impact on the patient’s life “is one of the few truly patient-centric classes of services available for trials today”, Wylie adds.
P
