The National Minority Quality Forum (The Forum) is working with its National Health Index (NHI) and Microsoft Corporation to launch the National Clinical Trial Network (NCTN). It is expected that the network will be available in the fourth quarter of 2013 to address the issues of recruitment and diversity in conducting clinical trials. This collaboration will enable NCTN to provide a comprehensive database of clinical trial options to providers.
The Forum is a Washington D.C. based not-for-profit, non-partisan, independent research and education organization dedicated to improving the quality of healthcare available for all populations.
“It’s our view big data will change the way we conduct clinical trials moving forward. What makes the NCTN platform unique is it will provide an interactive, communications portal linking researchers to practicing physicians whose diversity of patients may be candidates for clinical trials,” reports Gary Puckrein, President and CEO of the National Minority Quality Forum. “Being able to quickly link the broader community of medical researchers, practicing physicians, tertiary care centers, and allied health professionals together, we can expedite discovery and translational research.”
NCTN will also be a data warehouse containing patient registries, bio banks, and community level health statistics. The objective is to transform isolated data repositories into an integrated, searchable, national archive, thereby permitting the rapid identification of representative samples of risk populations who might benefit from a proposed therapy.
NCTN will maintain searchable profiles of clinical research institutions, experienced clinical investigators and individuals interested in being a clinical researcher. The investigator registry will provide background information on investigators, their practices, and the communities that they serve.
For more information, go to www.nmqf.org.
