Greenphire, based in suburban Philadelphia, and San Francisco startup Mytrus have developed web-based solutions to streamline the arduous tasks of recruiting, retaining, and efficiently administering clinical trials. Greenphire’s ClinCard System, a web-based patient payment, management, and communication platform, compliments the functionality offered by Mytrus and its innovative methods for allowing patients to participate in clinical research studies directly from their own homes.
Greenphire and Mytrus hope to empower patients to play a larger and more critical role in pharmaceutical development. In contrast to the traditional environment in which patients have often needed to repeatedly travel long distances to be evaluated by participating medical centers, Mytrus allows patients to use innovative web technology to provide their own study data over the Internet and then be immediately compensated directly to a Greenphire ClinCard debit card the patient carries around in their wallet.
Greenphire’s patent-pending ClinCard technology offers a fully configurable, web-based patient payment, management, and communication engine, enabling sponsor and site administrators to deliver study-specific messaging programs executed by text, email, and voice messages while delivering patient stipends, managing patient travel arrangements, and providing travel reimbursements in a controlled and automated real-time environment. The ClinCard’s functionality is in compliance with industry regulation and implemented according to the requirements of each specific study protocol. The ClinCard System has been proven to drive increased site and patient satisfaction, reduced site and sponsor administration, increased patient retention, increased protocol compliance, and reduced regulatory risk for the sponsor.
Mytrus’ revolutionary model effectively relieves the clinical environment of confinement to brick and mortar research offices, replacing them with web-based tools for recruiting and managing patients from a single remote site in San Francisco. Mytrus studies feature Greenphire’s ClinCard technology to deliver real-time stipend and reimbursement payments to their study participants. Patients receive a ClinCard immediately upon study enrollment and then receive milestone payments as they progress through a study.
By introducing technology driven ways to provide easy and instant patient access, Greenphire and Mytrus can significantly impact subject recruitment, retention, and overall study satisfaction. It has been estimated that up to 30% of patients drop out of phase II/III trials, resulting in 90% of studies missing their target completion dates. Greenphire and Mytrus are out to convince large pharmaceutical developers that implementing new technology-based tools to improve retention, compliance and administrative efficiency will go a long way towards reducing the estimated $1 billion cost associated with bringing a new product to market.
