Quintiles, the world’s largest life science services company, and Allscripts, a leader in electronic medical records, will jointly develop software aimed at improving drug development and results.
Goals for the software development is to improve drug research and late-phase modeling as well as patient recruitment for clinical trials.
If successful, the companies say the software will “significantly reduce” bottlenecks in clinical research, education about new drugs, proof of compound safety as well as effectiveness and value.
The partnership will target late-phase research as well as clinical trial monitoring and surveillance of drugs after approval.
Quintiles sees a variety of products being offered to clients.
“From a Quintiles perspective, when we say, ‘software solutions,’ we’re talking about software tools which can be provided in three ways,” said Quintiles spokesman Phil Bridges.
“We will be able to deploy solutions as packaged solutions so customers can integrate their own data into them.
“Secondly, they can be a hosted solution as part of Quintiles Infosario so the customer doesn’t have to make an outlay of capital.
“Finally, we can provide the solution as an integrated service along with other Quintiles services.”
Usage of data from a variety of sources made available through electronic medical records “could enable companies to improve the efficiency of processes involved in the development and evaluation of new drugs,” Quintiles and Allscripts said in the announcement.
Last month, Quintiles acquired access to some 40 million “de-identified” medical records for use in research. De-identified means patient identity has been protected.
“This partnership with Allscripts is further proof of Quintiles’ ability to apply our industry-leading expertise to solve thorny industry problems, enabled by technology,” said Gavin Nichols, Quintiles’ vice president for research and development innovation in information technology. “We are very pleased to be partnering with industry leading Allscripts. We believe biopharma, patients, providers and payers all will benefit from the technology solutions that grow from this undertaking.”
Financial terms were not disclosed.
“Everyone benefits from a faster, more efficient drug development process, and many of the practices and hospitals we work with have been asking us to help them to better collaborate with the variety of research opportunities now presenting themselves,” said Steven Schwartz, senior vice president of Corporate Business Development for Allscripts, in the announcement.
“We believe this relationship will result in bringing new drugs and discoveries to market faster to improve patient care – known as post-market surveillance – which will become an increasingly common requirement in our view. Most importantly, this is another groundbreaking step in using the new kinds of clinical information we are gathering from Electronic Health Records to improve patient health outcomes,” he added.
[QUINTILES ARCHIVE: Check out a decade of Quintiles stories as reported in WRAL Tech Wire.]
