Patient Recruitment through Social Media

Yesterday, we posted that patient recruitment is a huge factor that causes biotechnology companies to run years behind on their timelines. Shahid Shah’s latest post on The Healthcare IT Guy discusses an easier, less expensive and time-saving alternate approach to traditional patient recruitment practices.

We’ve all heard of web 2.0 and social media by this time, but who would have known that patient recruitment could be done through social networking platforms. TrialX, which is a healthcare IT startup, has done a great job of using Google’s and Microsoft’s health platforms available to match participants to relevant clinical trials based on their personal health information. I look forward to when TrialX will completely integrate with Microsoft Health Vault and Google Health making it even easier for patients and investigators to find each other.

This trend will interesting to see as more and more healthcare companies being adopting web 2.0 patient recruitment methods in their practices.