Quintiles, a fully integrated biopharmaceutical services company, and Allscripts, a software company, have entered a strategic partnership to jointly develop software solutions to enable improvements to the drug development process and demonstrate the value of biopharma products in the real world.

The pair aim to develop products designed to significantly reduce some of the bottlenecks that traditionally impede clinical research, outcomes, education and proof of new compound safety, effectiveness and value. Areas of focus include late-phase research, recruiting for and monitoring of clinical trials and post-market surveillance.

The partnership's objective is to create new solutions to enable customers to leverage de-identified longitudinal data from many sources in a HIPAA-compliant manner. This data could enable companies to improve the efficiency of processes involved in the development and evaluation of new drugs.

"Everyone benefits from a faster, more efficient drug development process, and many of the practices and hospitals we work with have been asking us to help them to better collaborate with the variety of research opportunities now presenting themselves," said Steven Schwartz, senior vice president of corporate business development, Allscripts. "We believe this relationship will result in bringing new drugs and discoveries to market faster to improve patient care—known as post-market surveillance—which will become an increasingly common requirement in our view. Most importantly, this is another groundbreaking step in using the new kinds of clinical information we are gathering from Electronic Health Records to improve patient health outcomes."

The agreement greatly expands activities between the two companies, who have worked together on a number of projects over the past few years.