Drug Discovery Opinion

Launched in 2009, the Medpedia Project aims to evolve a model for sharing and advancing knowledge in health and medicine. It provides a free online collaborative platform, allowing healthcare professionals to contribute to the growing knowledge base. As well as building a medical encyclopedia, professionals and non-professionals can share information about conditions, treatments, lifestyle choices, etc. Other parts of the Medpedia platform include Medpedia Answers for asking and answering medical and health questions; Medpedia Alerts for displaying real-time medical and health news alerts; and Medpedia News & Analysis for sharing medical news and analysis. The latter includes syndicated articles from blogs such as this one.

Now Medpedia has announced the launch of their clinical trial platform, which updates every 24 hours from data at ClinicalTrials.gov. Search results provide details on a trial’s purpose, who may participate, locations, and contact information from a database of around 80,000 registered trials. Whilst these data are accessible via other sources, including ClinicalTrials.gov itself, the new platform allows content to be “pushed” or fed automatically to appropriate contexts. Trial information can show up alongside a Medpedia article covering the same condition, in a personalized feed of someone interested in that condition, or in a patient community related to that condition.

Dr. David L. Katz MD, MPH, Director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, said:

“Clinical trials are among the most important of tools for advancing biomedical knowledge, and improving the human condition. But for this to happen, the trials must successfully recruit their participants, and awareness of the trials must be effectively disseminated. All too often, these requirements are rate limiting. In its customarily user-friendly manner, Medpedia is helping to resolve this problem with its clinical trial finder. This tool should serve doctors and patients alike, helping to get important trials done, and helping to spread the word about important findings as they come in.”

This free resource is available now on Medpedia at www.medpedia.com/clinical-trials. All we need now is an easy way to find trial results!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 8:35 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.