Liaison Healthcare Launches Global CRO Integration Hub for Real-time Access to Clinical Trial Information

Liaison Healthcare, a global provider of secure cloud-based integration and data management services and solutions, announced today the launch of its Global CRO Integration Hub. The solution provides both pharmaceutical companies and contract research organizations (CROs) with a platform that simplifies the integration and harmonization of clinical patient and operational data across the clinical trial process.

Liaison recognizes the importance of increasing collaboration and improving interoperability for clinical trials between sponsors, CROs, providers and patients. In today's healthcare environment, pharmaceutical companies are outsourcing clinical trials to a variety of CROs. Information is constantly flowing between both entities throughout execution of the clinical trial. Given the number of electronic data capture solutions and trial designs; standardizing data is quite daunting. Adding to this complexity, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) prefers all clinical trial information is electronically submitted in the CDISC Study Data Tabulation Model (SDTM) format, which is typically not the way information is stored natively and can vary from firm to firm.

"Pharmaceutical companies continue to increase partnerships with contract research organizations (CRO) for clinical trials as a way to speed drugs to market," said Dan Serretti, Director of Global Clinical Development Integrations at Merck. "Liaison recognizes the importance of increasing collaboration and improving interoperability for clinical trials between sponsors, CROs, providers and patients."

Liaison Healthcare identified the need for a scalable, easy-to-use solution that automates and streamlines data exchange; accurately transforming clinical trials data into a compatible format for pharmaceutical companies, CROs, Government registries and the FDA. The Global CRO Integration Hub provides cloud-based connectivity and translation support to enable interoperability throughout the clinical trial process. By implementing the Global CRO Integration Hub solution, pharmaceutical companies and CROs are able to:

• Exchange information with multiple CROs for multiple clinical trials;

• Translate clinical data from partnering organizations into compatible formats;

• Scale and access information from multiple trials undertaken by a single pharmaceutical company;

• Quickly and efficiently move specific datasets to various location where they will be compiled, stored and analyzed; and

• Create a standard global library that can be reused in and across multiple clinical trials.

"The success and timing of a clinical trial is highly dependent on the accessibility of accurate and real-time information throughout the process," said Gary Palgon, Vice President, Healthcare Solutions, Liaison Healthcare. "Liaison Healthcare¹s Global CRO Integration Hub streamlines the exchange of data so that critical information can be leveraged into actionable insight, ultimately improving speed-to-market and availability of drugs to improve patient care."