Patients often learn about clinical trials through advertisements, their physician or online patient networks. But despite these various information channels, researchers often find it challenging to recruit study participants. Enter Boston start-up StudyHippo, a new web-based platform that aims to better connect patients and clinical researchers.
The above video explains how the service works. In a Q&A posted today on Medgaget, StudyHippo co-founder Alex Harding, an MD/MBA student at Harvard Business School and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, discusses the motivation for launching the company. He says:
There are so many health care start-ups out there, and we wanted to focus on an area that hadn’t gotten much attention.
One of my teammates, Rena Xu, is a medical student at Harvard and has worked in clinical research and as a member of an Institutional Review Board (IRB) for clinical studies at Harvard. She was the one who originally had the idea to create a website that would help clinical researchers find study subjects and help individuals find studies they could participate in. We all realized right away that this was a huge pain point–it’s essential for the advancement of medical research that researchers recruit subjects in a timely and cost effective manner, and it is such a challenge for researchers to do so today.
Researchers have told us that StudyHippo is exactly the tool they have been hoping for, and that it will make a huge difference in their recruitment process. And we’ve gotten great traction in signing people up for our website. There is a lot of pent up demand in the market due to historical inefficiencies.
To support the service, the company charges researchers a fee for advertising their studies through the website.
Previously: Screening for type-1 diabetes trials goes online, A closer look at caregivers and clinical trials, Advice for caregivers and patients about clinical trials and Clinical trials: My next good chance
