Advocate Touts Patient Engagement As Crucial To Trials — And Drug Companies Are Listening
Engaging patients on clinical trial design can make it easier to recruit and retain participants, and it can prevent researchers from having to change the experiments once they have begun, says Bray Patrick-Lake, a patient-engagement proponent.
Politico:
Adding The Patient Voice To Drug Development
“Patient focused drug development” is more than the buzzword for Bray Patrick-Lake. Seemingly healthy and athletic, Patrick-Lake discovered she had a hole between two chambers of her heart after she collapsed while six months pregnant with her second child. She suffered debilitating migraines, was put on oxygen and told there was nothing more doctors could do. She turned to the Internet, ultimately finding a clinical trial of a medical device, which was implanted in her heart. The trial got canceled in 2008 — which she learned about not from her doctors or the device maker, but from a Google alert. (Karlin, 1/11)
