The Cure Enablers

Cure Mania grips TrialX! Launching Cure Talk, Cure Bytes and Curepedia.

2010-02-05T23:15:00.003-05:00

As the Superbowl mania grips the football fans across the country this weekend, we at TrialX have been gripped with the launch of new suite of tools to enable patients to learn about new cures and treatments. Clinical trials provide access to cutting-edge, potentially life-saving treatments, however the patients are often not aware about these treatments options. There are several resources on the web that provide information on existing drugs and therapies, however, there is not a single, comprehensive information resource for patients to learn about upcoming treatments in clinical trials. With this need in mind, we wanted to create an information resource for new treatments in clinical trials but we did not want to create yet-another-health-website with static list of web pages filled with medical jargon. People nowadays get their most of the information (and news!) from their friends on social networks, micro-blogs and blogs. So we decided to create 3 complimentary information resources: Cure Talk, Cure Bytes and Curepedia that combine all the elements of opinionated/social knowledge, real-time information, and referential/authoritative knowledge.

About new cures, treatments and healthier you.

Information for your well-being in 560 bytes (140 characters) or less

A wiki of New Treatments

These tools are currently in early-beta and we'll be sending out invites over new few weeks to the TrialX patient and investigator community to contribute to these resources and provide us feedback. Let us know if you have any suggestions or comments.

Welcoming 2010 with a Global Embrace. TrialX Launches in Canada, UK and India

2010-01-01T00:43:00.008-05:00

We have had a great 2009 and we wanted to start 2010 by empowering people across the planet to benefit from clinical trials and medical research. We have received several queries from folks in the last few months asking if TrialX would be available in other countries. So we thought why not start a series of international sites starting 2010 (and quite literally; as i type this blog, CNN is showing folks screaming the countdown to 2010 at Times Square). So we are officially launching TrialX in three countries today - Canada, United Kingdom and India. We have had the TrialX Canada site (in partnership with SMD, a Canadian company) available for some time now. And its picking up a steady stream of visitors and users.

And today we turn on TrialX United Kingdom and TrialX India. We will be launching TrialX in another set of countries in coming days (hoping that we will be in countries spread across 5 continents!).

TrialX Canada

TrialX UK

TrialX India

It truly is exciting going global. By the way, in case you have been wondering, yes, we are heading out to celebrate the New Years Eve. (We are 3 hrs behind on the West Coast, so could watch the revelry in NYC as we post this)

A very Happy New Year!

The TrialX Team
Signing off from Pasadena, California

Thanks for making 2009 a Great Year.

2010-01-01T00:38:00.008-05:00

Today we bid farewell to 2009 and its been a great year. It has been an exciting, challenging and rewarding to get TrialX live and up and continuously evolving. And we thank all our users who have used the site to find a clinical trial for themselves or their loved ones. We have had a very encouraging response with hundreds of clinical trials searches being performed all over the country everyday.

2009 also saw us expand TrialX beyond the main website and our PHR integrations with Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health. We launched our Clinical Trials search widget that can be embedded on any third-party website (see example). We integrated TrialX with Twitter so that users can find trials through Twitter. In September, we launched our iPhone Application which lets you find a clinical trial near you.

As always we are looking forward to working harder and continuously improving TrialX in 2010. There is a lot more to come and we are as inspired, motivated and excited as the day we started TrialX. Wishing our users, friends and every one, a very Happy New Year! And yes, we are welcoming it a big embrace (more about this in the next post).

Today is the World AIDS Day. Support the fight...

2009-12-01T04:41:00.014-05:00

We've come a long way in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Once a deadly terminal disease, AIDS is now categorized as a chronic disease. Thanks to the development of new treatments such as the anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) that have helped bring down the death rates dramatically. However, the fight is still far from over - In 2008, about 2.7 million people, including 430,000 children, were newly diagnosed with HIV and total twenty-five million have died since HIV/AIDS was identified in 1981.

To completely eradicate this disease, researchers are working tirelessly towards an HIV vaccine. You can help in the development of the vaccine by participating in a clinical study. Below are a few clinical studies listed on TrialX:

You can follow the directions on the trial page to identify the research site nearest to you and contact the investigator of the trial. Our goal at TrialX is to make the process of finding the right trial and contacting the investigator quick and painless.

Companies today are showing their support to the fight against AIDS. At TrialX, we are showing our support with a red logo and red color theme through the day.

Clinical Trials API, Real-time Analytics and AJAX Widget

2009-10-22T23:02:00.013-04:00

Web is becoming real-time. Websites are opening up firehoses of real-time data streams that are gobbled up by widgets and Waves. Some call it the Web 3.0. At TrialX, we've been working towards creating a similar momentum in the clinical research space - the Clinical Trials 3.0 - the goal is to capture and share data in real-time that can enable innovative, collaborative medical research such as flu trends and post-market drug surveillance, of course, while respecting the user privacy.

Towards this goal, we are opening up a real-time clinical trials feed through an API and a new AJAX based Widget. The API unleashes the full power of TrialX's clinical trial matching technology to power your website. We'll do the hard work of maintaining the updated and most comprehensive list of clinical trials. The API is based on a RESTful architecture to enable quick and easy integration with your site or app regardless of the underlying programming environment. And this all comes with a Google Analytics style real-time tracking dashboard (see below).

The dashboard provides real-time statistics on:

Impressions: The number of times the embedded widget was displayed to a user on your website
Visits: The number of visitors from your website who ended up on TrialX.
Sign Ups: The number of visitors from your website who signed up on TrialX. We flag these users as originating from your site.
Messages/Referrals: The number of total investigator contacts made by the flagged user.

We had released the first version of TrialX widget awhile ago that is now being actively used at places like here, here, here and here. After the initial iteration, we received several suggestions from you (Thank You!) and we've made the changes accordingly. First and foremost, we've revamped the widget using AJAX technology. What that means is that the widget would load 'asynchronously' and faster. Next, the widget now allows you to set any width or height to fit on your website's real-estate. And finally, you can now customize the fields (Age, Gender, Location) that you wish to add or remove from your version of the widget.

This is a small but important step for us towards creating the global online ecosystem to facilitate medical research using new Web technologies. We are excited to be at the innovative leader in this space and we look forward to your feedback and support to improve our services.

TrialX Supports the HIT Platform Initiative with Moksha

2009-09-29T01:42:00.040-04:00

Its been a great day attending the Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) platform discussion organized by Ken Mandl and Isaac Kohane (See #ITdotHealth on Twitter). They recently proposed creating an "iPhone like" platform for HIT. There were some great discussions and interesting updates including those provided by Aneesh Chopra, the Fed CTO, Todd Park, HHS CTO and several other luminaries.

This development is particularly exciting for us at TrialX for several reasons. We come from a HIT background and are passionate about creating innovative, next generation Healthcare Information Systems. Systems that are designed to be inter-operable, extendable and scalable from the ground up. A critical bottleneck with current systems, particularly, Electronic Health Records (EHR) is the difficulty of moving data out of the system and sharing it meaningfully with another system while preserving the semantic mapping of data elements across the two systems (so that "blood pressure" maps to "bp" in the two systems). The lack of easy availability of the data and the ability to build on top of an existing system has left the HIT landscape fragmented and dependent on individual vendor companies to build new functionality. We need an open, simple, developer-friendly way for HIT systems to talk and exchange data. In short,

1. HIT is plagued by layers and layers of proprietary code that locks-in the data
2. Standards are usually too “heavy” or used in non-standard ways making data integration a nightmare
3. Developing an “App” over Twitter, Google Maps or Facebook takes 1-2 days. But a relatively simple HIT App takes months! No wonder you don't see Mashups or Apps being created in this domain.

These are some of the reasons why we have built our technical architecture at TrialX to avoid the critical problems of HIT systems. Our architecture aims to achieve extensibility of the data model, perform in-built mapping of data elements to standard vocabularies and provide the data to third-party systems through a simple access protocol. For example, all the clinical trials and patient data in our database are indexed using standard semantic vocabularies. For a condition, lets say high blood pressure we have mappings of this to other equivalent terms such as hypertension, increased blood pressure and so on, based on a collection of knowledge from several biomedical vocabularies. This makes it simple for us to share or import data with other health data systems such as Microsoft HealthVault, Google Health and content partners such as CenterWatch.

Next our data model itself is highly extensible. Instead of complex relational tables, we use a schema-free data model similar to that of Google's Bigtable and Facebook's Cassandra that allows us to capture, store and query rich set of health information with faster performance.

Coming to data exchange protocols, as pointed out on his blog yesterday, Dr. Halamka points out the need for having APIs to extract data from systems. We have seen the power of the APIs in other web 2.0 sites. And so we have exposed our entire matching technology and clinical trials search ability via a REST-based TrialX API. For example, the Clinical Trials Widget, the upcoming Clinical Trials iPhone App and Clinical Trials Twitter App, use the same underlying API to send all matching requests to our server. So in effect, we have created different interfaces to the database but all through a single standard data request format as specified in our API. As, Professor Regina Herzlinger, eminent Harvard economist and Alfred Spector of Google mentioned during the event, give the API out and then let the developers innovate!! We have seen this really work for us.

As we progressed with building TrialX, beginning in January this year, we began toying with the idea of carving out elements of the TrialX technology and make it available to support the development of a new generation of HIT systems (we received positive responses from folks we presented this to). The project was internally code-named, Moksha, a Sanskrit word that means liberation. In this context liberation of data from locked silos and freedom to use it meaningfully, (thus explaining the slogan, 'Why Federate, When you can Liberate'). Moksha was inspired by some other successful models, including the Google Android and to some extent, Drupal and we see it very much aligned with the philosophy of the platform proposed by folks at CHIP. The Android can sit on a number of different hardware platforms, hiding the underlying hardware complexity from Android App developers. In that respect elements of Moksha can serve to create the EHR/HIT API framework (perhaps we can call it the EHR OS), providing several standardized core services, abstracted over different EHRs. Elements of the Drupal model can help create the architecture for building functional modules (or Apps) and provide a way for modules to form the presentation layer, with each module providing its HTML elements to create one complete page of the system (Drupal generates each page dynamically with modules providing their HTML at run time, with the core engine calling theme functions to assemble each block into a cohesive page).

The goal is to make it easier for developers to write usable Apps that run across systems and can be developed without spending months trying to integrate with an EHR or just understand its complex data model. Moksha could sit on top of existing EHRs and expose the underlying data through a common API and developers can build on top of this API (arguably a tough sell for vendors), providing a collection of Apps to chose from. Of course many details need to be figured out, particularly with respect to making the Apps work within existing systems.

This event and the growing discussions, underscore the need to catalyze the much needed innovation in HIT. And to do so NOW! As a innovative startup, we are committed to doing our bit to make this HIT Platform come alive. We have certain technical pieces and enthusiasm and what is better than to get it going. After all, we could all achieve Moksha!

Stay tuned as we release some of our internal technologies and system design concepts under the MokshaProject.org to support the HIT Platform vision.

TrialX and CenterWatch launch strategic partnership. Another step forward in the TrialX ecosystem!

2009-08-18T18:47:00.017-04:00

Today marked the culmination of the hard work put in by both the CenterWatch and TrialX teams. The integration between the two companies went live today at 10 am ET, along with a nationwide press release. It is a key strategic partnership for us that marks another instrumental milestone in the history of our company. We are one step closer to creating an ecosystem where participants and investigators can find and communicate with each other effortlessly.

CenterWatch and TrialX will jointly market our online patient recruitment solutions to CenterWatch consumers, including patients looking for clinical trials and trial investigators. In addition to utilizing CenterWatch’s vast array of clinical trial services, their investigators will now be able to recruit participants for clinical trials using TrialX. You can read more about our services here. You can also find TrialX’s services listed on CenterWatch under Investigator Sources.

We have absolutely loved working with CenterWatch, not only are they experts in this space, but more importantly, they are wonderful people, easy to work with and looking to get things done. Those are the kind of partnerships we love and we are ever so pumped to be partnering with them!

Related press release on PRWeb.com

Putting Clinical Trials Search in Your Hands (literally), with an iPhone app!

2009-08-02T05:21:00.008-04:00

For the past few weeks we have been actively working on a cool new iPhone application that will empower health consumers, patients and doctors to find clinical trials anywhere, anytime. We have always been focused on putting useful technology in the hands of our users. But, this time, doing so literally! It has been an exciting time and our team could not be more thrilled to see days and nights of active discussions, app naming sessions (e.g., a candidate name was Dr. Tapp – the TrialX App) and hacking the iPhone SDK (go KG!) slowly coming to fruition.

The first version of this application will be targeted to doctors and patients. Using the App, doctors can search for a clinical trial that matches their patient’s condition (say, shown in the comic strip below) and email the results to the patients right away. They can filter clinical trials by geography, medical condition, treatment or the institution conducting the trial besides other parameters. The search results are automatically filtered to show the trials nearest to the users current location (the power of the iPhone, GPS!).

Similarly, patients and/or their family members can use the App search for clinical trials effortlessly and email the trial investigators right from their phone. A video demo and more details about the new application are available at TrialX Mobile. And we would love to get your suggestions and feedback.

Future version of the App will have several enhanced features. For instance, users will be able to save and retrieve their search results, automatically synchronize their TrialX.com account with their iPhone application and also use the App on an Android or Blackberry.

We will be launching the APP this month but before that happens, we want to hear from you. We welcome all ideas and suggestions (you can leave comments below, email at info@trialx.com or tweet us @trialx) so that we can make our application better suited for you!

TrialX Interface 2.0 with more powerful clinical trial matching

2009-06-15T15:00:00.002-04:00

We are excited to announce the release of new clinical trial matching user interface that now provides patients a powerful way to find matching clinical trials more effectively and easier than ever. Here is a screenshot of the new match interface:

The overall design is geared to enable patients follow these simple steps (from left to right) to find matching clinical trials:

1. Specify Your Health Information:
The first new enhancement is a new "search sidebar" providing wide range of options to filter the matching clinical trials. Patients can manually enter their health details, location and trial information or they can use their Personal Health Record (such as Google Health or HealthVault) to securely import their health information to find the trials. One of the significant change is the inclusion of patients' current medications to enable more specific and granular matching (more on this in the next blog). Also lets say you are looking for ongoing trials in a specific institution such as Mayo Clinic or MD Anderson, you can use the trial-information based search to narrow down your matches.

2. Get Matching Clinical Trials
Yes, you still have the familiar matrix interface to get your clinical trial matches along side your health information. To handle the addition of new match parameters, we've now added a "slider" on the top that allows you to scroll across different parameters to see where you match or don't.

As in the previous match interface, each cell in the matrix interface indicates the following:

= A complete match on a search parameter against the corresponding trial

= No match on a search parameter against the corresponding trial

= No information provided for the given search parameter

(NEW) = No trial information available for the given search parameter. This option is necessary in a few scenarios. Lets say you specify that you are taking Aspirin and a clinical trial has no eligibility criteria corresponding to current medications, this option simply indicates that we cannot determine a match based on this parameter.

3. Contact Trial Investigator

The last column in the matrix shows your match score. As you'll notice we've removed the percentages and replaced them by a "Qualitative Score" with the number of matches and total parameters in a parenthesis as shown below:

Besides the user interface changes, we've done several major improvements in our matching algorithm and data models to enable more specific matches and faster result generation. In next few weeks, we'll be adding deeper integrations with the Personal Health Record platforms to utilize the full potential of the match interface.

As we keep enhancing TrialX to connect patients with clinical research studies, we would love to get feedback from you about our service and features. Stay tuned for some exciting new announcements in coming weeks and months!

Amazing Day! TrialX Wins the NYC Entreprenuer Week Business Plan Competition

2009-04-24T23:20:00.008-04:00

Today was a BIG day! We just won the New York City Entrepreneur Week 2009 Business Plan Competition .

This entire exciting and busy week was leading up to the final pitch today; a great pitch in the semi-final round on Monday and a smooth demo at the health 2.0 conference on thursday. As two of us were on our way to Colorado, our third partner was making an awesome pitch to the judges at the NYC ENT competition. He had been practicing and practicing and it all came through effortlessly when it mattered the most.

We were the last of the 7 final teams to present (selected from 21 semi-finalists)and it just so happened that as we landed at Denver, the pitch had begun. So we just holed up at the lounge of the airport (btw, the Denver terminals are really nice) and began following the event tweets(a sample below).

(@Ericschonfeld): 'TrialX, lets patients use their health records to find clinical trial matches. Really smart'.

And then came the wait, almost for four hours (yes we kept waiting at the airport, both anxious but also enjoying our new found freedom of being in a big open space with super fast internet via the sprint air card). After a few hours of anticipation they finally announced....

That yes, TrialX had won!!! Absolutely, frickin Unbelievable! We were so excited that our Advantage Car rental guy also shared the excitement (btw - he was really nice and waived the fee for one day of the rental).

For a healthcare information technology company with a niche product and competing with some great tech companies in the NYC area, this was a big win. But more importantly, it is an acknowledgement of the potential of our technology to enable patients to find clinical trials of new treatments and connect with the trial investigators effortlessly.

As we take small steps to achieve our goals, such acknowledgements stimulate us to go leaps and bound. Thanks NYC ENT for giving us this opportunity and to all the judges for recognizing our efforts. And above all we thank all our users, who motivate us every day to keep doing our best in reducing the barriers to finding life-saving treatments.

Our journey has just begun and it coudnt come at a more exciting time as the healthcare industry lies at the cusp of major technology disruptions. And we as a young startup, hope to do our bit.

Great Start to a Big and Exciting Week at TrialX

2009-04-21T00:36:00.007-04:00

This is a busy, exciting and big week for us at TrialX.

1. Had a great pitch and demo at the NYC ENT week today and were selected to be one of the 7 finalists from 21 participants. Final presentation on coming Friday.
2. Tomorrow we are at the Social Phamra Unconference at Cambridge, MA. Will be exciting to brainstorm with the clinical trials 2.0 folks
3. Couple of big meetings on Wednesday. One with folks who want to know more about our Twitter APP (see how patients are using it to find trials and what they think). Go ahead try it!
4. Thursday - the big launch demo at the Health 2.0 Conference. Dont miss this one!
5. Final round Presentation at another big business plan competition on Thursday
6. Friday we fly to Denver to exhibit at the ACRP Conference. If you happen to be there visit at us booth #323 and learn more about our 'Do it Yourself' Clinical Trials Recruitment platform.
7. And yes, the Final pitch at the NYC ENT which is on Friday too.

So lots of things lined up. And Lots more to look forward to. After all these are times for change and disruption in the clinical trials space and health care information technology in general.

Now You Can Talk to Twitter and Find Clinical Trials on TrialX

2009-03-20T01:13:00.019-04:00

Twitter is emerging as a popular method of expression and communication through short updates (or micro-blogging) and has seen rapid growth in the last few months. The service is used by people to "update" what they are doing and apprising them of "what’s happening" by following updates of others. There are estimated 4-6 millions users of Twitter sending more than 2 million messages every day.
So how can Twitter be used to increase information availability of clinical trials and thus speed up the development of life-saving medicines? Well, there are many users on Twitter, who happen to be looking for clinical trials or even participants discussing research studies. For example, “@hjhunter is looking to participate in a clinical trial” or “@k_herb Being a participant in a clinical trial food study is super fun”. We wanted to help users like @hjhunter to find matching clinical trials, something we already have at TrialX, from Twitter itself. Hence, we developed a TrialX Twitter app to serve this user need and enable patients to find clinical trials personalized to their health needs.

How does TrialX Clinical Trial Matching Twitter App work?

The app is simple, and after our initial testing, looks useful (and might i add, fun). All you need is to QuTweet (query tweets pronounced cute-tweets) us at TrialX (@trialx), put in the keyword “CT” (for Clinical Trial) followed by your health profile (see example below)

As soon as you tweet us, the app will work behind the scene, sending the tweet to our 'tweet parser' through the Twitter API. After processing in about a minute, we’ll send you a reply tweet with a tinyurl link to the TrialX page containing matching trials as per your QuTweet.

So go ahead and try some of the following QuTweets:

@trialx CT find studies for my father 62 with pancreatic cancer in Raleigh area
@trialx CT studies for diabetes male 45 in new york
@trialx CT prostate cancer, NY, 60
@trialx CT 55 yo female with multiple sclerosis

Surely, if you don’t wish to divulge your health profile (we respect user privacy), simply follow us @trialx on Twitter and send the QuTweet as a direct message. We’ll reply you privately with your matching trials.

From a technology perspective, under the hood this service is a mash-up built using the Twitter API, TinyURL API and TrialX REST-based web API that allows users to "interact with TrialX" through Twitter!

We think that the power of this mode of communication is two-fold:

One, it allows a user to leverage an increasingly common mode of communication for finding useful information. The APP really aims to make twitter "talk to you" (an example of a personalized and responsive information interface)and provide you with information as you engage in a "conversation".
Second, since a user’s @trialx QuTweets are public, other people can discover and learn about clinical research studies by looking at what searches people are performing. This public and social aspect could potentially increase awareness of trials. The social cognition theory, states that there is a social aspect to cognition and learning; ‘we learn from observing others’. By seeing others use Twitter to find matching clinical trials, we hope to translate the collective tweeting of users as a way to spread greater awareness of clinical trials, which can specially help several people with life-threatening conditions to find new treatments. For example only 3% of cancer patients participate in trials but surveys have shown that many more would like to participate if only they were aware of trials and had a simple way to access trial information.

We are excited about this new Twitter-based TrialX App. It provides consumers another simple and yet effective tool to find information that may give them access to a new life-saving treatment and an avenue for them to help further medical research. We will actively continue to improve the parser so that we can handle more "natural language queries" and strive for other approaches to improve the information flow between TrialX and Twitter. And some of them are already in the pipeline (such as pushing live searches for trials onto Twitter). Till then, send us a QuTweet!

National Endometriosis Awareness Month - 5 simple ways to show your support

2009-03-02T15:27:00.015-05:00

Endometriosis or Endo is a disorder causing severe pelvic pain and (associated with) in-fertility that affects about 5.5 million women in North America and 5-10% of women globally. It is caused when the lining of womb attaches itself to ovaries and other structures outside the womb. There is no cure for endometriosis but there a few promising treatments options available.

March is the National Endometriosis Awareness Month and lets do our part to help raise public awareness and support the efforts to find a cure for this disease

Read about Diana Wallis's mission to raise the awareness. Diana is a survivor and a real hero decidated to the sole mission of raising awareness of Endo. She is a VP of European Parliament. She also writes a blog about her daily efforts to prepare herself for the London Marathon on April 26th.
Artists for Endometriosis Event for fundraising and awareness on March 7 2009. Add their FaceBook App.
If you are patient, there are several local support groups across the world that you can join.
On TrialX, we provide a listing of on-going endometriosis treatment clinical trials in the US and Canada. If you run a blog or website, show your support for Endometriosis by embedding this small widget.
We know you love Google but use this link GoodSearch.org for web search (and bookmark it!). They donate to Endometriosis Association every time you make a search on their site.

Lets just not stop after this March but continue each month by month and day by day to raise awareness and help find a cure for endometriosis.

Building a Social and Community-driven Knowledgebase of Clinical Trials

2009-02-21T00:17:00.007-05:00

We recently made a big enhancement at TrialX and we couldn't be more excited. We have been working feverishly to make improvements to our site making it easier for patients to find trials matching their personal health profile and enabling them to contact the investigators in a seamless and secure manner.

Now, we are extending TrialX to incorporate a whole collaboration and social aspect to learning more about clinical trials in general or about a specific clinical trial. As we have been brainstorming about what collaborative and social features of Web 2.0 would be apt for the clinical trials space, we have found clues by looking at our site utilization data and the feedback provided by users. We have been routinely getting emails from patients asking questions about a clinical trial, about trials for a particular condition or trials for a new treatment they may have heard about. For instance one user emailed (which sounded as if she really needed help to find a trial) about infertility trials. Some have asked us for results of a trial or even if we were still recruiting. Our logs also show many searches for keywords like "ms clinical trial effects" or the name of a treatment and its potential for a trial. The data and the users were clearly indicating that they have "unmet information needs" about clinical trials, new treatments and their effects.

We think that these information needs are different than knowing more about a particular condition (say, multiple sclerosis) for which sites like WebMD or Medline Plus are great. They are also different from finding about a particular prescription medication and its side effects. And they are also very different from some asking about trials in a patient support forum for a condition like Multiple Sclerosis or breast cancer. The deficiency (and thus the opportunity) being is that such sites are not a knowledgebase built around clinical trials and new treatments. It seems andour data suggest that there is a need for building a knowledgebase where patients can ask questions about a specific trial, about trials related to specific conditions or new treatments, discuss their apprehensions or doubts and other related issues. And if such a network can leverage the potential of the web to enhance collaboration and social connections, then the knowledgebase can increase tremendously in value and content.

Our TrialX team feels that this is an important "information gap" that needs to be addressed and a good area for introducing web 2.0 like features. Doctors dont have time to answer questions about trials (many dont even know what trials exist for what conditions). Investigators too find it hard to answer all details and for all patients. Other websites have no or limited information. And very importantly, we realized that its too much to expect patients to directly consider enrolling in a trial without first reading up a bit about it or "Ask Questions". So we have added a whole new tab on TrialX, "Community" . People can ask questions by going to this page or by clicking the "Ask a Question" button on each trial page. These questions can be answered by any registered TrialX user, be it a patient, an investigator or a clinical research coordinator.

Our community-driven efforts to build a collaborative knowledgebase around trials represents one way in which are trying to make Clinical Trials 2.0 a reality. We started by building a consumer-centric website. We have leveraged paradigm changing trends by integrating with Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. And now by switching on our community feature, we are furthering our commitment to make the process of finding clinical trials, learning about them and enrolling in them as easy and informative as possible.

Building the tools that empower our users to add to the knowledgebase and thus help others (and themselves) with similar questions to get their information need met, is our objective. Because this creates a win-win situation for everyone; more education, information for patients and less burden for investigators who would otherwise have to reply to every one about the same question. And in the process we are creating information that will help raise more awareness and dispel some myths about clinical trials among those who are not or are only partially aware about the benefits and potential of clinical trials

We will be launching more useful community features soon (again by listening to our users and looking at our data). Innovation grounded in user needs continues at TrialX!

We want to hear from You!

2009-02-10T04:22:00.016-05:00

We love to hear from our users. We value their feedback and suggestions. Over the last few months, we've been fortunate to have a few "power users" both as participant and investigators who routinely email us about some minor software problems, suggesting excellent new features or nice-to-haves. We take customer-service very seriously and respond often in matter of hours or within a day. We realized that it is painful for a user to go to the contact page then copy the email and then compose an email from their client to talk to us. We wanted to simply this process. Hence, we thought about creating a link that will take user to the feedback form page, which is the standard way to collect feedback on most websites. But then lets say a user is on a trial info page or logged into My Account, then goes to feedback form page then submits the feedback and gets a confirmation - by this time the user has distance of 2 pages from the original context. This is inefficient navigation. We wanted to cut this down. We discovered this widget from GetStatisfaction.com that adds a "Feedback" tab on each of the website pages, which when clicked creates an overlay (see the image below) for adding feedback and once the user submits the feedback, it can be closed and user can get back to what she was doing.

The neat thing about GetStatisfaction is that it stores the all ideas, questions, problems and praises publicly on a dedicated TrialX Customer Service page. This is extremely useful if there is already an existing answer to some question that a new user might have.

So go ahead, click the blue button and TELL US what do you think?

Change comes to TrialX

2009-01-23T05:43:00.008-05:00

Inspired by the sweeping changes made by the new administration, we've been making our own set of changes to TrialX. The first and the most obvious is the new design. At TrialX, we use the following design philosophy:

What does the user need?
Can she get to it?

Yes, thats it. We don't go about the conventional way of bringing in cadre of experts in product-design, web-design, CSS development etc. Consider for example, the menu bar you see at the top, we keep the Help link and the Home link consistently at same location on your screen regardless of whether you are signed into your account.

Here are the snapshots of the old and the new home page.

Before

After

Of course the matching results page interface is the same. Our users absolutely love it. We'd never change that. Nevertheless, a new design often causes confusion and dissent among the existing users, so please let us know if have a suggestion or if something annoys you.

With all these new developments, our single-most clear vision is to enable our users find new treatments and clinical trials effortlessly. Stay tuned for the announcements on exciting new features!

Why you should control and manage your own health records...

2009-01-20T18:15:00.005-05:00

I came across this recent blog post by Peter Neupert, Corporate VP for the Health Solutions Group at MSFT, and something very obvious yet interesting caught my attention - "Individuals should be encouraged to create and manage their health data asset and to learn how to share it to achieve better outcomes and interactions with the health delivery system."

I think Mr. Neupert brings up a very valid point, something that we at TrialX support wholeheartedly and have made this one of our primary goals to educate people about the benefits of having online health records. I compare the advent of the digital healthcare industry as the online banking 10 years ago. At that time, people were apprehensive and did not realize the value and flexibility of having their financial information online. A few years later, after the Paypal phenomena, online banking is as common and prevalent as can be. Imagine having to go to bank everytime you wanted to transfer money from one account to the other, or mailing in a check every month to pay off your credit card bills, can't think of it any more right? It's the same with your medical records - you are the owner, you should be in control of your own medical information. Think about the ease of moving from New York, Ohio or Idaho to London, Sydney, Delhi or Tokyo and not having to call up your doctor to fax or fedex your medical records half the world across. Furthermore, banking has become ubiquitous, and so should healthcare. We are eagerly waiting for the day when not only will we be empowered to control and manage our own medical information, but also will be able to use that information in a very constructive way to provide significant value added services.

We are setting up our "Learn and Educate" community section where people will be able to interact with each other, learn more about the benefits of clinical trials and electronic health records. They will be able to share their experiences about undergoing clinical trials for different diseases and ailments.

Launching the Investigator Signup

2009-01-09T02:48:00.005-05:00

We just completed the investigator sign-up process! Now any investigator or trial coordinator can signup on TrialX in less than a few minutes. Registration for investigators was an in-direct process earlier; it was based on an invitition to join for those investigators (or contacts) listed on ClinicalTrials.gov.

Once you signup, you are sent a welcome email with an activation link (so that we can validate your email). But you are still directed to your dashboard, "my trials" and "my messages" pages.

Using the "My Trials" tab you can add your clinical trials. There are two way to do so - one, by simply specifying the ClinicalTrials.gov trial identifier (your email that you use to register on TrialX must be listed CT.gov for that trial). If you are not listed for a CT.gov trial or want to add a trial that is not listed in our database, you can add a trial manually. The Trial submission form contains all the details that you may want to add. Upon submission you will be asked to submit a copy of the IRB (a page mentioning the trial and your name will suffice). We take patient privacy and information accuracy seriously (more on that in a few days), and hence have to ensure that only valid investigators who have the permission to do a particular trial are registered on TrialX.

Once you add a trial in your TrialX account, you can begin to receive contact emails from participants who match your trial criteria through our internal messaging system. You can check these contact emails under your "My Messages" tab and use the messaging system to reply to the participants.

Come join the next generation of participant to clinical trial investigator contact service. We would love to get your feedback.

We thank you for making 2008 a great starting year.

2009-01-04T00:07:00.000-05:00

Its been a hectic but exciting past few months at TrialX. We have worked on improving our services, grown in our user base, completed integration with Google Health and Microsoft Health Vault, developed a widget and are looking to many more exciting developments in the 2009.

We cannot thank our users, friends and family enough. We thank our users for taking the time and effort to checkout or use our service. Tools that empower patients/health consumers and enable them to utilize their personal health records more effectively are still in a nascent stage but the response from the early adopters has been tremendous and very motivating. Every time a potential trial participant searches for trials on TrialX, finds personalized matches and contacts the investigator, is excitement enough for us to work harder to make this work seamlessly, elegantly and securely. We hope in 2009 many thousands of potential participants can reach out to clinical trial investigators directly to know more and be recruited in clinical trials that could save their lives and further science.

We thank our friends and family to encourage us to pursue what we belief in passionately, despite the odds (and the troubled economy). And we thank those you have believed in our concept and blogged about it and those you have given us valuable feedback

Wishing you all a Happy New Year. And we will continue to work hard and play our part in empowering consumers to adopt new generation of PHR and PHR based technologies.

Words of encouragement ... that motivate us to make TrialX even better

2008-12-20T22:08:00.006-05:00

We got blogged a few months ago by The Medical Quack, Barbara Duck. She wrote of how PHRs could make it easier for patients to find clinical trials through services like TrialX. And in subsequent posts detailing what our match score means and show the step-by-step screenshots of how to use the service.

Sean Nolan, the Chief Architect of Microsoft Health Vault, says "One of my favorite new applications to go live on Health vault is TrialX"

A few days ago, The Healthcare Guy said that TrialX "Looks pretty friendly."

And slowly we are beginning to hear some twittering about TrialX

We have a long way to go in our efforts to help patients find new treatments easily. It helps to hear early words of encouragement.

Thanks folks. We will continue to work harder!

Enabling patients find new treatments anywhere

2008-12-11T03:10:00.006-05:00

We just launched the TrialX "Find New Treatments" Widget. The widget displays the exact number of currently active trials for a particular disease condition and allows the user to filter them by the state they live in. A widget for finding Multiple Myeloma Clinical Trials is embedded below.

The Widget is customizable; you can chose to limit the results of matching trials to one condition (e.g., breast cancer) or allow people to search for trials for any condition. You can even change the widget alignment and next chose any of the 5 exciting colors. Thats is in 3 steps you the widget ready. Just copy the code and paste in your blog (as below) or your site.

We can all do you our bit to spread awareness of clinical trials and help those who are desperately searching for life saving treatments that are offered in many clinical trials. All it takes is 3 easy steps to customize the widget and put it on any webpage!

Focusing on usability, user-experience and trust

2008-12-07T02:57:00.005-05:00

Things have been hectic, but as always exciting in the last few weeks. The site has come a long way since then. Among the readily visible changes are the much neater home page, a site tour and a much faster Google suggest like drop down in the trial search box (we call it intellisense). But these are just a few of the seemingly minute details one has been going through. With just one objective. Superior Usability and User Experience. Because we have to win (and wow) our users.

Usability of several sites that provide clinical trial listings or e-recruitment services has been less than desired. And this has been the status quo for years. In fact not much has changed since 2001, when a Forrestor study by Barrett found 18 clinical trials related websites lacking in user experience. Only 3 sites in the study received a positive score (on a scale from -40 to 40). One can clearly see the stark difference between such sites and the super-uber user friendly, hip web 2.0 sites of today.

I recently stumbled upon quite a few clinical trials listing sites through google's sponsored links that are almost closed to being a MFA (Made for adsense) site. A user can easily get lost in the myriad links and the several Google ads on such sites. Some others, lack brand value or content comprehensiveness; for instance, a site that heavily advertises on Google, didnt produce any results for "breast cancer trials and 3 non-relevant results for ALS trials.

At Trialx we want our users, specially the patients/participants to have a "pain-free" experience. We have tried to reduce the cognitive burden on patients to comprehend which trial in a search result of more than dozens fits them, by building a matching interface. We also dont overwhelm them with dozens of links. Our signup process is famously said to take less than "38 seconds". We absolutely do NOT want them to perform an extra click, if we can avoid it. We strive to give them accurate matching results and only for those trials that are still recruiting (why even list a trial that doesn't enroll patients anymore, as some well established sites do). And we do our best to ensure the security of our user's health information.

We have gone through repeated discussions and many development iterations to come to where we are. And we are still not done. For example, our matching interface still needs work. Our intellisense feature could reduce one mouse movement. And so on and so forth. The point is, we have to make this as easy as 1-2-3 and the task has only just begun.

My first blog at TrialX

2008-11-24T01:33:00.005-05:00

Wow, this is indeed a huge step for me personally. I have been working on TrialX with my partners for a few months now, and always thought of keeping everyone updated through the TrialX blog, but never got around to writing one. So here's to a new and dedicated beginning!

During such turbulent times in the US economy, it is difficult to keep focus on one's goals and not think about it. Surprisingly enough, the turmoil hasn't really effected our determination and we continue to move forward at breakneck speed. Having said that, we do expect indirect effects and so we are bracing ourselves accordingly. It sure is going to be a long long winter.

There is a lot to be done in pretty much every area you can imagine - technology, services, business development, finance etc. etc. Expectedly so, our team has been burning the midnight oil everyday trying to maximize every minute of our lives. Although we've been in existence only for a few months, I am already starting to look back and reflect on the evolution of TrialX. It has been an amazing start to a journey that is becoming even more exciting and challenging everyday. We've spent countless of hours brainstorming ideas, avenues, opportunities and what not, and slowly we are seeing things come together.

There's much to write about, but I'll keep the introductory note short, lest I bore you too soon :). In the following posts I'll take you back in time to our beginnings and how we reached here and more on our vision, my view of the industry and of course, a little bit about me, so that you know you're not just wasting time reading this blog :).

- Gazza

I was told there is absolutely nothing they could help me with, no treatment

2008-10-01T19:56:00.006-04:00

says Jolanta Stettler, a 39 year old female from Denver, who was diagnosed with ocular melanoma and had less than six months to live. As reported in this NYTimes article, she and her husband searched the Internet to find an ongoing study that used a new treatment that injected tiny beads that emit a small amount of radiation - this helped her for 18 months. Next, she searched for advanced clinical trials and enrolled in a clinical trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health that used concentrated chemotherapy, which resulted in reducing of her tumors by half.

A search for "ocular melanoma" or "eye cancer" on TrialX.org gives 2 on-going clinical trials:

Investigative Trial of Interferon Alpha-2b To Shrink Cancer of the Eye : This clinical trial is investigating whether the drug currently showing promise in skin cancer can be used for eye cancer. The trial is enrolling patients with tumor size greater than 8 mm in diameter and greater than 2 mm in thickness. The patients taking any form of immunosuppersive medications will be excluded. This trial is being conducted at (If you are not sure about whether you qualify, you can use your health record from Google Health or Microsoft HealthVault with TrialX.org to determine whether you are eligible for this clinical trial and contact appropriate trial investigator)
Optical Coherence Tomography of Retinal Abnormalities Associated With Choroidal Nevus Choroidal Melanoma and Choroidal Melanoma Treated With Iodine-125 Brachytherapy: This trial uses an advanced imaging technology that provides pictures of inner tissues of eye which wasn't possible before. The trial is currently being conducted at the Jules Stein Eye Institute in Los Angeles, CA.

There are hundreds of Jolanta Stettlers out there who have been told "there is absolutely nothing that can be done" but these brave souls kept fighting and did not give up. Ultimately, they are helping millions of others and the future generations who will get the timely benefit of the new therapy or drug developed as consequence of their participation in these studies.

We are finally live on Microsoft Health Vault

2008-08-24T15:20:00.001-04:00

Its been an intense few weeks of coding, brainstorming and business strategy development at Trialx.org. But its all paying off. Trialx.org has been accepted as an official application on the Microsoft Health Vault platform! And we are listed right on the front page.

The MS team has been very happy with our development and responsiveness. They recently emailed us that Trialx.org was chosen for an internal quarterly review as the top 3 health vault partner application accounts! And have been impressed that we have completed the application requirements without any

So now, as a health consumer, if you create an account on HealthVault, you can add Trialx as a application to automatically discover matching trials based on your health conditions. Go check it out.

We have also developed a python library to get Trialx working with HealthVault. The code will allow your application to interact with HV over a secure connection. Check out the code here.

We will be announcing other major partnerships and agreements shortly. And yes, the site is undergoing intense development to build the investigator pages!