Article at a glance:

Using IT to speed up clinical trials

• The sooner a drug can pass its clinical trials, the bigger the revenues before its patent expires.
• The first wave of IT innovations to streamline the clinical-trials process used electronic-data capture to speed up the collection and analysis of information.
• The second wave promises even greater savings if pharmaceutical companies adopt an end-to-end perspective by integrating the planning process for a number of trials and by creating modular, reusable tools to plan them.
• Pharmaceutical companies should also make electronic-data capture easier for research physicians to use, perhaps by creating an industry standard.