BioClinica acquires MediciGroup

NEWTOWN, Pa.—BioClinica Inc., a specialty clinical trials services and technology provider, has acquired a leading global patient recruitment and retention firm, MediciGroup Inc. The acquisition includes affiliates MediciGlobal Ltd. and Access to Patients LLC. Medici also provides a lost-to-follow-up (L2FU) patient locator service  that finds missing patients globally. Together with Medici, BioClinica will offer pharmaceutical companies comprehensive patient recruitment and retention services that improve the speed and efficiency of global clinical trials.

 

“This exciting acquisition adds a powerful patient recruitment, retention and lost-to-follow-up engine to BioClinica,” said BioClinica CEO Dr. John Hubbard. “Medici’s proprietary technologies and processes ensure eligible patients are enrolled and retained in clinical trials, further accelerating clinical development timelines. As one company, we will bring a new clinical services model to our customers that is thoughtfully designed to achieve high-performance efficiencies in global trials.”

 

Medici claims to lead the industry in its ability to recruit patients from all over the world for clinical trials across numerous therapeutic areas, specializing in orphan disease and unique patient populations for hard-to-recruit clinical trials. Medici manages more than 30 global patient communities online that, along with their patented tools and cutting-edge digital methodologies, help clients meet or exceed their recruitment goals. The company has implemented more than 200 programs for some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies since its founding in 1992. Medici is distinguished by the quality of patients sent to sites based on a multistep screening process using patented tools and digital methods. Its proprietary L2FU technology maintains clinical trial integrity and minimizes missing patient data by significantly reducing the number of patients lost to follow-up.

 

“We not only find your patients—we help keep them,” says Liz Moench, founder and CEO of Medici. “Together with BioClinica, our services will deliver an important model focused on speed, quality and cost efficiency for clinical trials implementation. I find the openness of BioClinica’s leadership to pursue new technologies and approaches especially exciting for our customers as we move toward the future.”

 

Moench notes that Medici was first to design retention programs, labeled VIP for very important patients, including all groups from pediatric to the elderly. “We focus on support, education and appreciation,” she tells DDNews. “We correlate recruitment techniques to retention rates and use multiple screening steps and demonstrate 40-percent improved retention.”

 

Medici’s L2FU program is also a model of thoroughness. “We subscribe to very robust data sets,” Moench notes, and proceed through a 10-step process that only requires an in-field search in 2 percent of cases. Drop-outs may be due to any number of causes, from a patient having entered a nursing home with no forwarding address or simply due to side effects. “It’s increasingly important to track these events for FDA approval,” Moench states.

 

BioClinica and Medici have already worked together on studies where the Medici Global team has leveraged data from BioClinica’s technology. The two companies recently collaborated to complete enrollment for a global study on Alzheimer’s disease ahead of schedule.

 

“When we integrate our recruitment metrics with BioClinica’s system, we can manage clinical trials in real time. This enables us to monitor enrollment rates by sites and drive performance at all levels—recruitment marketing and site performance from start to end,” said Moench.

 

Moench will lead the company’s global patient recruitment and retention services, headquartered at BioClinica’s Philadelphia-area office.

 

MediciGlobal touts that it is in the business of making a meaningful difference to patient health by identifying and engaging patients for clinical trials and by building deep and lasting connections with its many stakeholders—patients, researchers and pharmaceutical sponsors. MediciGlobal’s maintains that its clinical trial recruitment practices are guided by global standards and by a concern for the lives of the patients who put their trust in the Medici team. The company works to make certain that those who participate in clinical trials fully understand what clinical trial participation means, and that their participation is guarded by strict privacy policies. MediciGlobal also says that it is an industry leader in the use of social media and Internet-based technologies to connect patients with physicians to clinical trials and advance new medicines; its more than 30 Facebook communities exceed one million fans and more than 12 million visitors weekly. MediciGlobal meets BBB OnLine and WBENC accreditation standards and is certified as a Safe Harbor company.

 

BioClinica is a specialty clinical trials services provider that improves the development of new medical therapies by delivering expertise and technologies that enhance clinical research data and analytics, worldwide. The company offers industry-leading medical imaging services, enterprise eClinical technologies, clinical research centers and cardiovascular safety solutions that bring quality and efficiency to every phase of clinical development. BioClinica’s experience spans three decades and includes thousands of studies in all therapeutic areas. The company serves more than 400 pharmaceutical, biotechnology and device organizations, including all of the top 20, through a network of offices in the United States, Europe and Asia.