Introduction

Clinical Trials are a type of research that studies new tests and treatments and evaluates their effects on human health outcomes. Enrolling in a clinical trial can be extremely beneficial for both patients with chronic conditions and healthy volunteers.

“For those suffering from a chronic condition, enrolling in a clinical trial may offer options that might be unavailable otherwise and it also presents an opportunity to have access to top notch medical care as well as being a unique way of contributing to the advancement of medical knowledge. For healthy volunteers, knowing that others may benefit from their efforts can be very rewarding, and participating in clinical research can sometimes uncover health problems that people are not aware of.” ~ Tesheia Johnson, executive director of the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation

 

Unfortunately, the challenges in clinical trials usually aren’t discussed as much as the results themselves. One of the biggest challenges is faced just before starting clinical trials: patient recruitment.

Around 80% of these studies are either halted or even closed due to low patient recruitment. One reason for this is the specific requirements of the trial. Each disease area has a unique patient base for clinical trials, and finding the right patients is often a huge challenge.

Moreover, NIH focus groups in 2011 found that many members of the general public lacked familiarity with clinical trials and were unaware of opportunities for participation by healthy volunteers. This lack of awareness has certainly been a contributing factor to the fact that only 4% of Americans have ever been involved in a clinical trial.

Goals and Objectives

Motivation: Improve patient recruitment for clinical trials & provide medical information in a more colloquial way.

• Build a website for users to find interested clinical trials easily
• Give clinical trials updates and news to users

How will our product be different from existing products?

• Aggregate trial information in one central site and provide live updates to make trial progresses easier to follow
  • Keep track of new papers with references to trials/studies on our site
• Provide more digestible information for people unfamiliar with medical jargon. A major cause of low enrollment is the lack of understanding about what’s involved in clinical research and why it’s important to participate
• Personalization features
  • Allow users to set up a profile and follow medical topics/trials of interest so that they are notified if any updates occur
  • Also give recommendations based on user profile