AMC Health Advocates for Telehealth-Enabled Clinical Trials to Accelerate Cancer Treatment Availability for Patients

NEW YORK, Feb. 23, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- AMC Health, a leading provider of real-time patient management solutions, and recognized for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of clinical trials, participated in a recent conference that explored methods, processes and technologies to significantly reduce the time for critically ill patients to have access to promising new treatments.  Reducing the gap between discovery and approval of new drugs, frequently as long as 10 years, was the focus of the recent Closing the Gap Now Conference, which hopes to accelerate and expand access to medicines for people with cancer and other deadly illnesses.

At the February 18th conference, John Holland, Senior VP for Research of the Clinical Trials Division of AMC Health, described the company's pioneering work in accelerating the pace of drug approval by reducing the time required to complete clinical studies. It has been shown that travel time, distance from the study site and frequent site visits make it difficult to recruit subjects for trials and contribute to high dropout rates, causing long delays and increasing the risk of trial failure.

Holland reported on AMC Health's participation in new studies, which leverage mobile technology to seamlessly capture trial data from patients in their homes, enabling subjects to participate without having to travel to a study site. Using telehealth to conduct video eVisits and collect biometric and symptom data remotely enables patients who live far from a traditional clinical trial site to participate in a wide variety of trials for diseases such as prostate cancer, multiple sclerosis, ulcerative colitis and Parkinson's disease. AMC Health technologies significantly expand the geographic recruitment area by reducing travel and time burdens on patients.

This improved patient connectivity increases speed of recruitment, improves compliance with test protocols and helps retain more subjects for the duration of the study. Remote monitoring also improves the quality of clinical trials by enabling collection of more robust data, which leads to faster conclusions and higher quality submissions.

Watch the following video to see how eVisits can be used in clinical trials: http://www.amchealth.com/clinical-trials/

About Closing The Gap Now
Closing the Gap Now (www.closingthegapnow.org) provides patients who are experiencing life-threatening diseases with its Open Access and Open Source Pathway that combines Big Data analyses, systems biology, and crowdsourcing with digital tools that enable patients to record their progress and drug effectiveness in real time. Patients who would otherwise be left with few, if any options can receive open access to treatment solutions, which have demonstrated some success in early clinical trials.  

The Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation and The Children's Cancer Research Foundation, along with assistance from The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, have made it possible to present Closing the Gap Now (CTGN). For more information visit ClosingTheGapNow.org

About AMC Health
AMC Health is a leading provider of customized, scalable and cost-effective "real-time" patient management solutions that assist organizations serving at-risk populations or that conduct clinical trials. Its patient engagement, health monitoring and care coordination solutions have been proven in several studies published in peer-reviewed journals to improve patient outcomes and quality of care, and reduce overall healthcare costs. AMC Health is headquartered in New York, NY. For more information, visit www.amchealth.com.

Contact: Jan Shulman
Amendola Communications for AMC Health
[email protected]
480-664-8412 ext. 12

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SOURCE AMC Health