Press Releases

Portals can bring social media benefits

CenterWatch Article Discusses the Role of Social Media in Clinical Trials

The latest “hot” topic in clinical trials is how social media is a “must” for patient recruitment. There is little doubt this new public forum holds an important place in patient enrollment and participation.

But what about using similar, albeit private, social media tools with “communities” that already exist internally to clinical trials—those between sponsors/CROs and their sites?

Few sponsors recognize these private communities, let alone garner their benefits. A Clinical Trials Community Portal (CTCP), which plugs in to existing systems through web services, is relatively simple to add. The CTCP’s primary function is improved communication between the sponsor/CRO and sites. The operational benefits, savings and efficiencies come from features including:

• Send/Receive/Track documents electronically
• 21 CFR Part 11 compliant signatures
• Immediate and secure communications via secure Live Chat
• News and alerts
• 24/7 online training available
• Enrollment tracking—sites can see how they are doing vs. others; sponsors can evaluate site performance over time.

The community component of the CTCP also can have a great impact on trials. Private and secure forums, blogs and image galleries can motivate CTCP usage and, by extension, keep sites focused on the objectives.

The investigator’s involvement in the day-to-day operation of a trial can be critical to recruitment success. The CTCP enables the physician to provide insights, opinions and input on his schedule on any device. According to Frost & Sullivan, 70% of healthcare professionals use social media to communicate with other professionals. By using a CTCP, sponsors save sites time and provide motivational tools, including the sharing of ideas and best practices with colleagues in a private, moderated forum.

Sponsors and CROs can harness the power of social networking to change how their own clinical operations teams interact with their sites, facilitating the flow of communication. The key to improving trial quality will be engaging the trial community in dialogue throughout the duration of a study.

Beardsworth Chooses AxxiTRIALS – The Clinical Trials Community Portal Solution

Leading CRO selects AxxiTRIALS for its Clinical Trials Investigator Portal solution

AxxiemWebSolutions, a leading provider of digital solutions for the life sciences, today announced that Beardsworth, a full-service contract research organization, has selected its Clinical Trials Portal solution, AxxiTRIALS, for enhanced site communications in support of their "Investigator Express" program.

"This addition of AxxiTRIALSs provides important leverage to our BNet Trial Management System, by offering improved communications to the community of sites participating in a trial" said Michael O’Brien, Beardsworth President & CEO. "We see AxxiTRIALS, with its unique abilities to build a "closed community" among trial sites, to be an innovative solution to one of the biggest challenges facing global trials – timely and efficient communication between Sponsor, CRO and the Investigative Site."

"The enhanced communication pathways will provide our CRAs and Project Managers faster access to the sites and will offer a faster methodology to process Start up regulatory packages. The ability to provide a secured E-signature (CoSign) platform will compress valuable time and expense in the collection and tracking of regulatory documents, alone," states Evette Riegel, RN, Beardsworth Sr. Director Clinical Operations.

AxxiTRIALS will be integrated into Beardsworth’s Investigator Express program and will be a cornerstone of the investigator communication platform.

"We are delighted to be working with Beardsworth and their clients," said Susan MH Lewenz, Axxiem’s President & CEO. "AxxiTRIALS is designed to fill an important need that companies have in improving communications between their trial operations teams and the investigators/coordinators at clinical sites. Our Community Portal empowers users by providing a simple and secure way to efficiently distribute, sign, and track time-sensitive documents. Additionally, training materials, including embedded videos, are "at the ready" for users around the world, with the additional ability to share ideas and best practices via our Forum and Live Chat features. Our goal is to build a sense of community among the trial sponsor and clinical trial coordinators. AxxiTRIALS is also designed to implement quickly and integrate seamlessly with existing systems, like Beardsworth’s "BNet" Clinical Trial Management System."

About Beardsworth
Beardsworth Consulting Group, Inc. (http://www.beardsworth.com) is a full-service CRO whose service offerings span all stages of drug development and clinical trial management. With a command of the complex trial, Beardsworth’s niche expertise focuses on oncology/supportive care and vaccine therapeutics. Beardsworth brings 25+ years of experience, expertise and commitment to provide clinical trial solutions for results, on time, and within budget.

Headquartered in Flemington, New Jersey, Beardsworth provides global reach that is local in connection. Beardsworth is the founding partner of OncologyOne® – an alliance of top regional CROs providing full service business and research strategies for global oncology trials. Beardsworth is a federal CCR registrant and designated Small Business.

About AxxiemWebSolutions and AxxiTRIALS

For over eight years, Axxiem has been designing and building custom web solutions for a broad range of pharmaceutical and biotech clients, including Eli Lilly, Regeneron, Aldagen, The Medicines Company, Pfenex and Transparencyls.com.

Seizing the opportunity to better serve our customers, Axxiem built AxxiTRIALS with direct input from existing customers and end users who wanted a system to improve communications between their clinical operations staff and trial sites. The result is a web-based, fully customizable global portal, designed to save the clinical trial sponsor time and valuable resources as well as to engage, motivate and better inform investigators. AxxiTRIALS provides a secure and simple way to distribute and track time-sensitive documents and training materials, to share patient recruitment metrics, and to build a sense of a community among sponsor staff, global clinical investigators, and other outside resources involved in the trial.

 

Axxiem Announces the Release of AxxiTRIALS 2.0

--New version to debut at Partnerships in Clinical Trials in Orlando March 5-7th--

AxxiemWebSolutions announced today that it will debut AxxiTRIALS 2.0, the latest release of its Clinical Trials Community Portal solution, at the Partnerships for Clinical Trials event in Orlando on March 5-7, 2012.

"Listening to both our customers and their clinical sites, we had the opportunity to enhance several important features of our system," said Susan MH Lewenz, Axxiem CEO. "AxxiTRIALS 2.0 has a simplified, even more engaging dashboard for the site users to get tailored information at a glance. For the portal administrators at the Sponsor or CRO, the dashboards are more robust and easier to manage."

The new dashboard includes enhanced focus on Action Items - documents that must be read or signed - which are featured prominently at the top of the dashboard and are indicated with a hard-to-miss flag that stays up until all action items are addressed. Important alerts about the trial overall or specific to the study site are shown in the scrolling new ticker at the top of the page. "Our customers wanted more channels that could be used to speak to their trial sites" commented Kate Zelenova, AxxiTRIALS Associate Creative Director. "A system is only as good as the adoption experience of the user base. Every design decision we make starts first with this consideration, so we strive to keep the interface intuitive and the page contents flexible."

Building on the community aspects of our investigator portal, AxxiTRIALS aims to keep all trial stakeholders in step with meeting the trial's objectives, such as maximizing enrollment rates. So the AxxiTRIALS 2.0 dashboard features various graphics summarizing day-to-day progress of patient recruitment, such as interactive maps and bar graphs.

"We also made some important improvements to the myBinderTM feature of AxxiTRIALS," added Ms. Lewenz. "Helping users to manage documents in a way that is intuitive and effortless is a real art. In the new design, users don't have to file or categorize anything. If they open and read a document - guess what? - it gets filed in their "Read documents" folder. If they don't, it stays in "Unread". Users just need to act on their documents. AxxiTRIALS will do the rest."

AxxiTRIALS will be providing demonstrations of the enhanced Clinical Trials Portal at their exhibit booth (#200) starting at 5:00 PM on March 5th. We invite attendees to visit and learn about the utility of this product specifically for their clinical trials.

More Info at:
Dave Rosa
tel: 877-4AXXIEM (877-429-9436)

 

More sites turn to clinical trials portals, dashboards to improve management and communication

CenterWatch Article Speaks to Clinical Trials Portals and AxxiTRIALS. CenterWatch recently published an article on the growing use of Clinical Trials Portals:

As sponsors and CROs feel the pressure to improve clinical trial efficiency, increase enrollment and maintain a solid bottom line, it’s critical that they avoid information overload while measuring the right performance indicators as data from multiple sources is streamlined.

That’s the tall - and growing - order of clinical trial portals, now used by study managers, data managers and medical, safety and regulatory staff to help plan, conduct, manage and review trials....

Read More at CenterWatch.com