University to test electronic health data
The method promises to bridge the enormous gap between the number of people typically needed for trials and how many come across relevant advertising.
Electronic health data, long considered to be the next improvement in data collection, is to be put to the test in a clinical trial led by Duke University.
The trial will evaluate the best daily dose of aspirin for patients with heart disease. Beginning in December, the study aims to recruit 20,000 people using electronic health records.
It will be the first study of its kind to adopt the strategy, but researchers hope to eventually use it across medicine, health conditions and with both common and rare diseases.
The method promises to bridge the enormous gap between the number of people typically needed for trials and how many come across relevant advertising.
To make the electronic recruitment work, seven participating health care systems will feed their electronic health records into a programme that converts raw records into searchable participant information that is stored in a secure central database. This will allow researchers to pick up certain health information from patient records, regardless of which system they came from.
Speaking to Scientific America, Jean Claude Zenklusen, director of the Cancer Genome Atlas - a large-scale project to characterise cancers - said that such an approach would be a 'game changer'.
"Now we basically have to do a lot of publicity and go to all these doctors' offices to see if they have anybody that would be a good fit. There is no centralised place where all that information is stored - and if there was, it would be much easier," he said.
The study will be funded by the Patient-Centred Outcomes Research Institute to the tune of $14 million.
Veterinary practices are being urged to help owners safely dispose of any unused and expired pet medicines - not just antibiotics - during November's Animal Medicines Amnesty. 
