homework 5

Marcus Leary

2/25/12

MIS

Drug makers Mine Data for Trial Patients

            Drug companies have hard times trying to get patients to help with the required testing needed for new drugs. If they didn’t get patients to do tests, they would be appending too much money and taking a long time to research new medicine for the hospitals and they would also fritter away months of patent protection. That process would allow any rivals to catch up. One remedy that they have come up with is to pay the hospitals to let them have patient records so they can choose who would be the most compatible for their test.

There are five big drug makers, who are led by the company Pfizer, will have 13 different hospitals from different parts of New York send them information on their patients. John Murphy, who was a senior director of clinical analytics for Quintiles Transnational, had said “this is going to be a game changer, making medicine into a science and less of an art.”

            The program goes by the name PACeR, which is short for Partnership to Advance Clinical Electronic Research, is one program among many other company and other organizations that seek away to earn a profit off of the flood of clinical data that is being obtained electronically. There are a few other companies other than Pfizer that are funding the project. Those other companies are Merck, Roche, Johnson and Johnson and Bayer Healthcare. Quintiles and oracle are two companies that are helping with the development of the system.

            Federal law forbids the disclosure of patient information that hospitals have on their patients. The only way for drug companies to get help in their tests for their new product, they give money to PACeR and PACeR goes to the hospital and inquires about the info. Each inquiry costs range from 50,000 dollars to 200,000 dollars.

            Doctors and hospitals are into the idea because they turn into attractive research partners for the projects that are going on. The director for clinical innovations at Pfizer, David Leventhal, said that an every day delay on a phase three project would cost 1 million dollars and it would usually last for 90 days. David also said “Even if that number is only 25 percent right, it’s still a compelling message.”