New clinical trial approach reduces time and costs of many studies

From an April 8 2011 Science Daily report

ScienceDaily (Apr. 8, 2011) — Doctors at the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System are testing a new kind of clinical trial that’s not only less costly but guides doctors to switch to the best treatment even before the trial is completed. The new approach — called a point-of-care clinical trial — was developed by Stanford University biostatistician Philip Lavori, PhD, and a Boston-based team as an alternative to expensive, lengthy, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials to compare drugs and procedures that are already in regular use.

“The goal of point-of-care clinical trials is to deliver the best care to patients while learning from each experience and redefining that care,” said Lavori, a professor of health research and policy at Stanford’s School of Medicine and the senior author of an article on the method to be published online April 4 in Clinical Trials. “This ‘learning and improving’ loop will enable health-care institutions to more rapidly fold improvements into their medical practices,” he said….

…”The idea of embedding research into clinical care has been around for quite awhile but to my knowledge this is the first time that a randomized trial has been fully integrated into a hospital’s informatics system,” said Fiore. “It demonstrates an effective way to use electronic medical records to improve health care at a local level.”…

Journal Reference:

1. R. A. Rosenheck, J. H. Krystal, R. Lew, P. G. Barnett, S. S. Thwin, L. Fiore, D. Valley, G. D. Huang, C. Neal, J. E. Vertrees, M. H. Liang. Challenges in the design and conduct of controlled clinical effectiveness trials in schizophrenia. Clinical Trials, 2011; DOI:10.1177/1740774510392931

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