US-based biopharmaceutical services company Quintiles has announced a strategic partnership with electronic health records specialist Allscripts for the joint development of software solutions to reduce bottlenecks in clinical research, education and health-outcomes evaluation for new drugs.
The objective is to create solutions that will enable customers to leverage de-identified longitudinal data from a number of sources in compliance with the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, part of which is concerned with the security and privacy of health data.
Areas of focus for the collaboration, whose broader remit is to improve the efficiency of processes involved in the development and evaluation of new medicines, will include late-phase research; patient recruitment for, and monitoring of, clinical trials; and post-market surveillance.
The two companies have worked together on a number of projects over the last few years, but their agreement “greatly expands” on that relationship, they pointed out.
Groundbreaking step
“Everyone benefits from a faster, more efficient drug development process, and many of the practices and hospitals we work with have been asking us to help them to better collaborate with the variety of research opportunities now presenting themselves,” commented Steven Schwartz, senior vice president of corporate business development for Allscripts.
Most importantly, Schwartz added, the partnership with Quintiles is “another groundbreaking step in using the new kinds of clinical information we are gathering from Electronic Health Records to improve patient health outcomes”.
