CRF Box selects Palm Handhelds for clinical trials

CRF Box revealed the handhelds will be a key component of CRF Box’s new front-end solution for testing and evaluating new therapeutics in clinical trials.

By Editor on Feb 26, 2002

CRF Box revealed the handhelds will be a key component of CRF Box's new front-end solution for testing and evaluating new therapeutics in clinical trials.

In addition, the partnering companies also revealed the Palm handhelds are intended to help CRF Box customers accelerate the approval of new pharmaceuticals and help to increase their overall sales of marketed drugs by raising the quality and improving the speed of data collection during clinical R&D.

According to CRF Box in a typical trial, patients are trained and then issued Palm handhelds and SD Cards loaded with software applications that remind and prompt them to make entries in their trial diary. During the trial, the patient data is transferred to the SD Cards.

In our experience, in the majority of deployments where our pharmaceutical customers have a choice of platform, they prefer Palm OS because it offers superior robustness and functionality at a cost ensuring the highest ROI, said Timo Ahopelto, CEO at CRF Box. Within this agreement, we are able to provide even faster program set-up times and provide increased returns for our pharmaceutical customers.

We prefer Palm, specifically in the U.S. market, because Palm handhelds are easy to use, offer expansion capabilities, and provide a cost-effective deployment alternative, said Jaakko Ollila, Vice President of Business Development at CRF Box. Patients like the ease of use that Palm handhelds offer. Many patients are elderly or disabled, and the user-friendly interface Palm handhelds provide makes it easy to teach patients and investigators how to use them.

CRF Box predicts that many people taking medications in the future will be asked to report on their experiences using a handheld device, allowing pharmaceutical drug marketers to collect data.

Palm handhelds with the Palm Expansion Card Slot are transforming the clinical trials industry by giving solutions providers like CRF Box a faster, more accurate and less costly way to conduct clinical trials for their customers, said Pam Carlson, Senior Director, Business and Government Sales at Palm. We are excited to know that Palm handhelds will help CRF Box facilitate the efforts of companies that are working to develop new medical treatments for patients.