Database software company Oracle recently launched the Oracle Health Sciences Network, a set of cloud-based applications designed to advance medical research and help recruit participants for clinical trials, eWeek reports.
Oracle developed the applications with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Aurora Health Care, a health care system in Wisconsin and Illinois (Horowitz, eWeek, 7/6).
How the Network Will Work
The network aims to help drug companies and health systems cull de-identified patient data from electronic health records and other databases to determine whether a health care organization has enough patients to participate in a clinical trial.
Oracle plans to store the data on a dedicated secure server that would be accessible only to members of the Oracle Health Sciences Network.
The network eventually could provide an infrastructure to help researchers develop drugs for patients with specific genetic characterizations and compare the effectiveness of different treatments (Boulton, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 7/1).
First Applications
The first applications that the network will offer are the:
- Oracle Health Sciences Protocol Validator, which aims to help identify patient cohorts for clinical trials and determine the feasibility of clinical trial protocols; and
- Oracle Health Sciences Patient Recruiter, which aims to help recruit patients for clinical trials based on their genomic and clinical characteristics (Goedert, Health Data Management, 7/5).