Boehringer taps Medidata e-clinical tech for another five years

Boehringer Ingelheim was an early adopter of Medidata's electronic data collection (EDC) platform for clinical trials, and has now extended and expanded the contract.

The new five-year alliance renews Boehringer's use of Medidata's Rave RDC toolkit, a cloud–based clinical data management system used to capture, manage, and report trial data, extending a collaboration that goes back more than seven years.

It also signs the German pharma company up for myMedidata, a suite of patient-facing technologies aimed at enhancing patient centricity and diversity in decentralised clinical trials (DCTs), currently seeing an upsurge in adoption by the pharma industry.

The web-based myMedidata patient portal provides access to electronic consent forms and electronic Clinical Outcome Assessment (eCOA) to capture patient experiences, as well as offering video-based investigator/patient visits.

Boehringer will also explore the use of Medidata's artificial intelligence-powered analytics tools to improve the "speed, success, and quality" of clinical trials, as well as its imaging capabilities.

"Boehringer Ingelheim and Medidata have a responsibility to innovate for the benefit of patients," said Anthony Costello, chief executive of Medidata's Patient Cloud unit.

"Together, we will be able to quickly improve access and diversity of participation in a wide range of clinical programmes," he added.

A recent IQVIA study suggested that DCTs – which allow data acquisition to be done remotely and directly from patients through digital devices like sensors, sponsor-provided devices, smartphones, and tablets – can provide significant reductions in key clinical trial challenges, including time to first patient in, overall recruiting time, protocol deviations, and screen failure rates.

Use of DCT approaches has rocketed since the start of the pandemic, but not without some concerns. For instance, there is a worry that DCT's reliance on digital technologies to allow remote access to clinical trials could compound disparities in access to clinical research among less tech-savvy demographics.

Medidata insists, however, that remote technologies "create opportunities to improve patient access, inclusion, and engagement across geographies, and improve patient diversity in clinical trials."

Earlier this month, Medidata launched a new Intelligent Trials Diversity module to help improve the equity of clinical trials by providing site-level participant demographic data, including race, sex, age, and ethnicity.