Quintiles, a private multinational company whose major business is in the management of clinical trials for drug companies, announced Tuesday that it’s formed a new unit geared toward online recruitment of patients for clinical trials. The Durham – based company announced Monday that the new unit will use membership of two of its websites, www.mediguard.org and www.clinicalresearch.com, to find people willing to participate in clinical research, or other studies. Mediguard.org is a free medication monitoring service, with around 2.5 million registered users, that provides patients with safety alerts, drug recalls, updates and checks for possible drug interactions, according to a news release from Quintiles. The company created www.clinicalresearch.com, which has 165,000 registered users, to increase awareness and understanding of, and participation in, clinical research.
Phil Bridges, a spokesman for Quintiles, said in an email that most of the company’s digital outreach to patients is done through emails and monthly newsletters to people already registered with the website www.clinicalresearch.com. He said the company is looking to grow the number of registered users on its sites through an "aggressive search engine optimization campaign" to bring in people who are searching online for clinical research information. "We reach out to people who are already registered on Quintiles’ sites through electronic newsletters and emails to inform them of clinical trial opportunities that match their interests, conditions and geographies," he said in the email. "We also reach out through email marketing campaigns to populations who have demonstrated an interest in healthcare topics."
Back in November, I renewed my interest in Quintiles, a huge Clinical Research Organization, centered in Durham, North Carolina [2006…, an invisible empire II…, in the shadows…].Were you to read this article cold, you would think that this was some new innovative idea Quintiles just came up with, but that’s hardly the case. That’s what these web sites were designed for in the first place. Reading the Mediguard web site, it looks to be a free site offering a service – keeping you abreast of announcements about the meds you’re taking. Alerting you to problems etc. Here’s what I found on the MediGuard site when I wrote an invisible empire II…:… if you go to the MediGuard website, it doesn’t look at all like a Clinical Research Organization subsidiary. It looks like a free service where you can be kept abreast of things about your medications. Quintiles is only mentioned on the back pages as providing the initial funding.:
MediGuard is a free medication monitoring service designed for specifically for patients – allowing them to take a more active role in their treatment through:
1. MediGuard Safety Checks: Screening for drug-drug and drug-disease interactions.
2. Sending you email alerts and updates as important safety information arises for your medications.
3. Sharing feedback from other members on side effects and other important information.
4. Providing you with a printable list of your medications.And here’s how you sign up:That last paragraph on the right doesn’t show up unless you scroll down to read through it. It says:
Deidentified data collected by MediGuard may be used for research purposes to improve drug safety knowledge. By registering with the MediGuard service, you are agreeing to receive information about research and medical education opportunities that may be relevant to your health and safety.
But to their pharma customers, they painted a very different picture:
On the Quintiles site, there are a couple of podcasts [Hugo Stephenson MD: President, Elisa F. Cascade: Vice President] that offer a more accurate picture of MediGuard. [also see below]. They’ve registered 2.5 million people on MediGuard and done "hundreds of studies" on this group – "observational research." So far it has been primarily marketing research, but they do some "patient-centric" research [eg clinical trials], measuring patient reported outcomes using instruments like the QIDS-SR. And they are keying the web reported information with the patient’s medical records. Their heading "leveraging social networks to conduct observational research" begs the question of whether MediGuard is a service for patients or for Quintiles‘ research.Note the equation: PRO + EMR + Lab [patient reported outcomes plus electronic medical records plus laboratory work]. So by signing up to track your medications, you become part of a patient pool for clinical trial recruitment, and may be asked to give access to your Electronic Medical Records or your physician. Elisa F. Cascade‘s podcast talks about this new way of doing clinical trials with great enthusiasm – happy patients, happy PHARMA, happy Quintiles [able to mine your whole electronic medical record]. Parenthetically, Alison Bass recently reported a Quintiles brokered deal [New drug industry partnership with hospitals could jeopardize patient care] to give PHARMA access to electronic medical records in a number of NY hospitals.
I know it’s a lot to read, but read it carefully if you just scanned it. They are advertising to their pharma customers that they can mine the database of people they’ve lured to their ersatz service site for clinical research projects, and gain access to the patient’s electronic medical records and lab work by working "with partners." So that article up there that says they "formed a new unit geared toward online recruitment of patients for clinical trials" is baloney. Mediguard was, from the day of its inception, simply a trick, a scheme to use people who signed on to their service as a new way to do clinical research ["leveraging social networks to conduct observational research"]. The lesson of the Trojan Horse revisited – beware of Greeks bearing gifts…
Or of Nemeroff’s at Symposiums http://www.adaa.org/resources-professionals/32nd-annual-conference/scientific-research-symposium 😉