BARRINGTON, IL – In a new addition to its Centricity portfolio, GE Healthcare is taking aim at clinical research studies, seeking to drive better management of treatment processes and protocols while also supporting improved research billing compliance.

 

"We saw an opportunity," said Michael Nolte, vice president and general manager of GE Healthcare IT. "We have customers in our install base – a lot of them, actually – that are academic institutions and, in some cases, have a lot of their income coming from clinical research."

 

Billed as the industry’s first enterprise-class clinical research management solution, Centricity Research helps institutions manage the complexities of research processes and compliance requirements, executives say, supporting efforts to achieve compliance, enhance safety, increase subject recruitment and facilitate agency audits.

 

GE Healthcare had help with the tool's development from Baltimore-based mdlogix, which specializes in clinical medicine and public health. Mdlogix's clinical research management solution was developed in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and other clinical research institutions.

The tool "has helped us more efficiently manage the 30 percent increase we have achieved in the number of research studies conducted at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine since 2007," said Dan Ford, MD, vice dean of clinical research at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

 

“Having successfully deployed our enterprise clinical research management system at one of the leading research institutions in the nation, we are pleased to work with GE Healthcare to bring this enterprise solution to market,” said Aaditya Goswami, CEO of mdlogix. “Our partnerships allow us to offer a solution unique in the domain for supporting clinical research compliance and maximizing efficiency.”

 

GE executives said they see a looming need for such a tool. If one looks at investments in clinical research studies, "in particular, by the NIH," said Nolte, "there are going to be a lot of efforts, and have been already," to get institutions to "rationalize a lot of the ancillary costs of that research."

 

"Within clinical research, there's what amounts to a tax that a PI (principal investigator) puts on top of a research study," he said. "That pays for the administrative staff, and functionality, and operations around the research activity."

 

Today, that's "incredibly inefficient and largely paper driven," said Nolte.

 

But Centricity Research aims to drive efficiencies in this corner of healthcare. "We see down the road a lot more pressure being placed on administrative costs around research,” he said. “This is going to shift to more of an enterprise view of how to manage clinical research across, in some cases, very complex organizations" such as Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic.

 

While its primary task in the short term is to address billing and revenue concerns, Nolte said increased integration with clinical systems is high on the agenda as the technology evolves. "We've done some of that at Hopkins, but we've got a lot more to do in terms of being able to fully use clinical data to look at populations, to ask patients if they want to enroll in a trial," he said.

 

"On the research side, a big hassle for a lot of researchers is specimen tracking," he added. "Researchers spend a lot of time redoing what amounts to work that's already been done around specimens. The ability to catalog, find and ideally bring into your study existing relevant specimens to use in the additional studies is a huge benefit." 

 

“GE Healthcare is introducing a major leap forward in clinical research management,” said Jim Corrigan, vice president and general manager of GE Healthcare IT. “We’re introducing a system that not only connects to our other Centricity offerings, but is pliable enough for today’s market by easily integrating with the variety of other systems that institutions have in place.”