Oracle(r) Acquires SiteWorks Solutions

Posted on January 25, 2004 By Corinne Jones News

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Jan. 15, 2004 – (http://www.oracle.com/tellmemore/?2716805)  Oracle Corporation acquired the assets of SiteWorks Solutions, a privately held supplier of clinical trial management software products that hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and research institutions use to manage clinical trials. The acquisition gives Oracle(r) the most complete and integrated suite of clinical trial applications in the industry. The integrated suite will help research institutions operate more efficiently and pharmaceutical companies bring new drugs to market more quickly.

Managing a clinical trial is a complex project management effort requiring the coordination of personnel at both the sponsoring pharmaceutical company and at the investigative sites where patients are enrolled and data is collected. Throughout the process, both sides must create and track the necessary regulatory documents required to ensure patient safety, and must manage the enrollment of patients and adherence to the specified clinical protocol as patients are treated.

The investigative site must then invoice the pharmaceutical company for patient visits, taking care to not double-bill the patient’s insurance carrier or government health service for the same treatment. Since large pharmaceutical companies and research institutions typically handle hundreds of simultaneous clinical trials, it is essential to have a complete trial management system so that these administrative and financial tasks can be handled smoothly, efficiently and accurately.

The acquired products from SiteWorks provide leading-edge capabilities for managing this complex information and automating many of these tasks. SiteMinder is used by hospitals and research institutions to plan, budget and manage their participation in clinical trials, while TrialMinder provides the same capabilities from the perspective of the sponsoring pharmaceutical company or contract research organization. Both products are user-friendly, Web-based and run on the Oracle Database. Oracle plans to integrate these products with the Oracle Clinical suite to provide a seamless, unified environment. For example, when a clinician or researcher at an investigative site enters data using Oracle Clinical Remote Data Capture, not only is that data immediately available to all authorized personnel, but now that same data can also trigger an automatic payment request to be sent to the trial sponsor.

“Pharmaceutical companies need to reduce the $800m cost of producing a new drug, and research institutions need to operate more efficiently in order to be attractive to those pharmaceutical companies,” said Keith Howells, vice president of Oracle’s Pharmaceutical Applications group. “Our integrated suite helps both sides by making sure that nobody has to do anything twice.”

“SiteMinder and TrialMinder are recognized as the best trial management products on the market,” said Dee Anna Smith, CEO of SiteWorks Solutions. “Oracle and SiteWorks share a deep commitment to our customers and will now be able to provide the most comprehensive suite of technology solutions available to support clinical trials.”

The Oracle Clinical suite of applications supports the clinical research process for 13 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies. The suite provides clinical trial customers handing large numbers of simultaneous clinical studies with the necessary tools to eliminate redundancy in remote data capture, track adverse events from all sources, summarize medical terminology and consistently and rapidly respond to regulatory inquiries.

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by Corinne Jones