We’re big fans of making information available to our patients — it helps them become active players in their health, and keeps us on our toes. So we’re pleased to hear about a new initiative from IBM and the IFPMA to index ongoing and concluded clinical trials. MIT’s Technology Review has the story:
… finding a useful trial has usually required hours of intensive searching or having a doctor who’s conducting an appropriate trial or knows other doctors who are — or just plain luck.
Now an initiative is making information from more than 88,000 completed and ongoing clinical trials searchable through a single website. In late March, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) and IBM announced the IFPMA Clinical Trials Portal that they hope will enable doctors and patients to find potentially useful trials and to make more informed medical decisions based on past trials. To facilitate this, the portal is designed to cut through medical jargon, correct misspelled search terms, and search for results in five different languages.
…The new, free portal is powered by IBM search software called OmniFind, which pulls together disparate information to make it searchable, Andrews says. OmniFind is based on the Unstructured Information Management Architecture, a set of processing engines that sift through different types of data (PDF, text, and HTML files) from many different sources (for instance, databases and websites), to pick out the information buried within documents that best match the search terms.
It sounds impressive — a step up from clinicaltrials.gov. Of course, we wouldn’t be surprised if Google soon blows this out of the water, with some sort of Google Scholar / Maps / Calendar hybrid…
More from the IFPMA Clinical Trials site…
