MedAvante Adds Centralized Ratings in Europe

HAMILTON, N.J., June 8, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- MedAvante, Inc., the leader in centralized expert evaluation of treatments for central nervous system disorders, announced it has added significant operations in Eastern and Western Europe, supported by a hub office in Munich, Germany, to complement its Centralized Ratings services offered in the United States and Russia.  MedAvante Centralized Ratings will expand to well over a dozen countries before the end of the year.

"MedAvante has reached an inflection point of global growth because our methods have been empirically and consistently proven to increase effect size and drug-placebo separation," said Paul M. Gilbert, Chief Executive Officer. "We are able to assure sponsors that wherever their trials are located, MedAvante's rigorous scientific and operational standards will address the root causes of trial failure due to inconclusive results."

MedAvante Centralized Ratings are being used in European studies including clinical trials for mood disorder and schizophrenia.  With Centralized Ratings, study outcome measures are administered by blinded, independent MedAvante clinicians in real time, either by telephone or videoconference.  Unlike decentralized raters at unconnected investigative sites, the entire cohort of MedAvante Central Raters can calibrate regularly to increase reliability, using actual subject interviews to standardize administration and scoring of assessments.

Major pharmaceutical companies have contracted MedAvante for multi-country studies, driving the expansion of MedAvante's existing capabilities in the U.S. first into Russia and most recently across Europe.  In early 2010, MedAvante opened its first hub office outside the U.S. in Moscow for Centralized Ratings using video teleconferencing to assess subjects in Russia and the Ukraine. 

Late last year, MedAvante established a corporate office in Munich to provide administrative and operational support for additional MedAvante Central Raters in Eastern and Western European countries.  A large majority of these clinicians are based in the same countries as the study subjects, and assessments are administered in local languages.

This growing portfolio of international work is enabled by proprietary MedAvante infrastructure and software systems such as MAVTAB, which manages the workflow of MedAvante clinicians and allows them to record the results of a live assessment of a study patient directly into a tablet computer, regardless of location.

To date, MedAvante clinicians have used MAVTAB to administer more than 20,000 unique assessments to more than 4,000 patients.  Automated workflow, coupled with flexible data capture and analysis capabilities, provides operational efficiencies and real time clinical oversight of assessments as they are being completed, and speeds availability of results to investigative sites and study sponsors.

About MedAvante, Inc.

MedAvante is the premier global provider of centralized expert psychiatric rating and monitoring services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries. Its flagship service, MedAvante Centralized Ratings, provides real-time assessments, either by telephone or videoconference, of subjects in global drug trials. MedAvante solutions help sponsors achieve increased drug effect and reduced trial failure rates, enabling them to bring better drugs to market faster. MedAvante operates facilities in Hamilton, NJ, Moscow, Russia and Munich, Germany.  For more information, please visit www.medavante.com.

SOURCE MedAvante, Inc.