It is a well known fact now that India is a hub for Clinical Trials. It has every reason to be chosen as the hub of Clinical Trials. There is vast patient pool, wide range of diseases, 30-40%lower costs incurred, educated doctors as well as well trained clinical trials staff. But the number of clinical trials being outsourced is continually declining. One of the main reasons for this drop has been cited to be unethical Clinical Trial practices, the other reason being time consuming government approvals. These have been the prime reasons for trials being outsourced majorly to the neighboring countries.
The time has come for us to make every effort to get more number of trials to India and improve our research efforts. One of the better ways to improve the Clinical Trials market in India is the implementation of mobile technology in Clinical Trials in India.
Why Mobile Technology for India?
India has 894 million mobile phone users as on December 2011.(1)This implies that about 26.72% of the Indian population uses mobile phones, which is the second largest in the world.
How can the implementation of Mobile Technology improve the situation?
Unethical practices in Clinical Research also include data tampering. Capturing clinical trial data directly from the patient in an electronic format on a mobile platform makes the data clean and consistent. Also it becomes very easy for the patient to report the data.
There is a lot of time lost in regulatory approvals already in India which costs money. Adding up to this is the non-compliance and loss to follow up of the trial patients which adds on to the costs. These can be taken care of very easily, conveniently and at low costs by deploying mobile solutions for clinical trials patient data capture.
Where do we come in?
After a lot of thought and research in the past couple of years, we have developed a mobile solution, PaDiSys-the Patient Diary System. Our PaDiSys mTA ensures that the patients are compliant to their medication by sending them reminder messages on medication intake. The PaDiSys mPRO ensures that the trial data is sent across in a clean and consistent form and at the time it is supposed to be sent.
There have been many trials the world over that adopted and used Mobile Technology in Clinical Trials. These trials have shown a marked improvement in the results of patient compliance. By implementing mobile technology in clinical trials in India, we not only have an edge over other countries but also are helping in fostering better research initiatives.
To know more reach us at info@nowpos.com or visit www.padisys.com
^ "Highlights of Telecom Subscription Data as on 31st December, 2011". TRAI. 8 October 2011
NOTE: The author, Ms. Rashmi Gurnani is a specialist in Mobile technology for Clinical and Behavioral research.
