We are excited to announce the launch of Datavant Trials, a new web-based trial tokenization solution that helps bridge the gap between clinical trial and real-world data (RWD) to accelerate research-grade evidence generation.
Over the last three years, the proliferation of real-world data at scale has dramatically changed how researchers are thinking about study design, operations, and execution — and the role digital patient data can play. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with increasing need for longitudinal follow-up has created many new opportunities for innovation in clinical trials.
In a recent survey, 96% ofLife Sciences leaders said RWD can have a significant impact on validating clinical outcomes and impact. Only 19% said they are extremely effective at doing this today.
We believe that over the next five years, tokenized clinical trials will be critical to reducing study costs and a force multiplier for accelerating therapeutic innovations for patients.
What is Datavant Trials
For trial sponsors, CROs, and public health researchers looking to unlock research-grade evidence generation across a variety of use cases by connecting trial data to RWD, Datavant Trials is the leading end-to-end privacy-preserving technology for neutral, flexible and compliant data connectivity.
The launch of Datavant Trials furthers our vision to connect the world’s health data so that research innovation and insights happen at scale and in every corner of the healthcare industry — and we are already working with more than 60 clinical trials to enable researchers to access more patient data.
Datavant Trials comes with powerful new site- and sponsor-facing applications. A web-based, site-level portal removes implementation and security review burdens for sites. A sponsor and CRO-facing dashboard helps sponsors understand, in real-time, the tokenization status across multiple sites and trials, while making it easier to communicate with sites.
Both products help enable end-to-end clinical trial data connectivity for easier longitudinal studies and lowered trial costs, with the Datavant Switchboard platform, including seamless integration with our identity resolution product, Match, and our expert privacy services through Privacy Hub. Learn more about how Datavant Trials products work.
With Switchboard, researchers are also able to access the Datavant Healthcare Ecosystem of 500+ RWD partners, the largest in the US, for access to hundreds of data partners for quick evaluation, discovery and linkage to the right data for a wide variety of research needs.
A new research paradigm
In response to the threat of COVID-19, we’ve seen the industry take giant leaps in how it thinks about RWD. We’ve seen sponsors keen to link historic and prospective medical data for:
- Gaining deeper insights into treatment response for investigational therapies,
- Following patients otherwise lost to follow-up for long-term safety and efficacy studies, including vaccine studies, and
- Finding more precise mechanisms of detecting disease through diagnostic lab test trials.
With Datavant Trials, sponsors are building a flexible, ongoing, and adaptable approach to data collection that lets them build stronger inclusion/exclusion criteria before a trial, more easily respond to unforeseen research questions during a trial, and reduce patient burden and costs of long follow-up studies after a trial.
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Working with digital patient data at scale
Trials that incorporate decentralized components, such as eConsent and other digital tools for data collection, remote monitoring, and telemedicine, have been among the first to use trial tokenization technologies in order to enable seamless long-term follow up through real-world data. As a patient-centered technology, decentralized trials are reducing patient burden and bringing seamless operational workflows to clinical site operators, leading to some of the most rapid innovations in clinical trials over the last three years.
For example, in a large study across multiple sites involving many patients, it can be challenging to get required information from all patients. DCT tools help by enabling patients to directly enter their personal information into an application. Datavant is integrated with the major DCT providers to make token creation and data collection easy across a wide spread of trial sites.
Siteless and hybrid studies are also ripe with innovative approaches to deploying and utilizing digital patient data. For example, some sponsors are validating patient reported outcomes by linking patient-generated data to Electronic Health Records (EHR) data and monitoring patient encounters with other clinical sites that are not part of the study by linking RWD.
Our vision for trial tokenization is to become an easy, flexible, and seamless part of every trial.
Looking ahead
As a result of these successes, there has been growing interest and evidence of the power of trial tokenization across a number of therapeutic areas, including oncology, cardiovascular, obesity, mood disorders, inflammatory diseases, and many more.
Clinical trials operating on a global scale are also hindered by interoperability and large disparities in datasets and collection methodologies. Datavant’s recent acquisition of Convenet, a health technology infrastructure company headquartered in the UK, is an important step towards solving the international challenges of data fragmentation. Building a UK trial tokenization offering extends the success of the Datavant Trials platform in the US.
Datavant is committed to expanding privacy-preserving tokenization and data linkage capabilities in order to connect clinical trial data to real-world data in the US and across the globe. We look forward to working across the healthcare industry as a neutral partner for trial tokenization and being a part of the continued momentum to accelerate both innovation in drug development and better patient outcomes.