Date: March 2003

Title:
E-Recruitment: Trial by Wire

...Other patients turn to CenterWatch. The grandfather of trial listings at nine years old, it sees its role as a publisher rather than a matchmaker, providing data to patients, doctors, and organizations sponsoring studies. Before CenterWatch began publishing trial information online, the only listings available were government registries. The federal databases don't include many industry-sponsored trials because the government requires sponsors to post study details that could be considered proprietary. And the government listings have been difficult for many patients to understand, although sites such as Clinicaltrials.gov and Cancer.gov have become more user friendly.

CenterWatch got around the usability problem by translating detailed protocols into simpler language. The site currently lists more than 9,000 industry-sponsored trials, as well as trials sponsored by the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health. Users select from a menu of diseases, enter a location, and hit "search" to generate a list of available trials. If a patient wants to learn more, he can send e-mail directly to the study site. "A patient might not feel comfortable picking up the phone and talking with someone at the research center, so sending an e-mail with questions is sometimes a better solution," explains Dan McDonald, director of Internet services at CenterWatch. The company says an estimated 800,000 people visit the site each month. The site is linked to almost 6,000 other organizations, notes McDonald...

Written by:
Dawn Stover, an editor at Popular Science