HCL Technologies partners with Oracle’s health arm to speed up drug trials

Indian IT services firm HCL Technologies has partnered with cloud services provider Oracle’s health arm to accelerate drug trials and reduce the cost of the development process, a filing with the Bombay Stock Exchange showed.

Oracle Health Sciences will use HCL’s faster intelligent trials (FIT) solution in collaboration with Oracle Health Sciences Mobile Health (mHealth) connector cloud service (Oracle mHealth Cloud), the statement added.

“The collaboration between Oracle Health Sciences and HCL enables clinical teams to establish digitally-enabled clinical trial processes and new digital trial methods such as remote patient monitoring,” Jim Streeter, global vice president, product strategy for Oracle Health Sciences, said.

HCL claims the FIT solution can be used in a variety of cases including improving patient engagement, collecting patient reported outcomes, monitoring patient safety, improving medication adherence or conducting e-visits during clinical trials to reduce patient and site burden.

The solution can also be applied to drugs that are already launched commercially such as remote patient monitoring, gathering real world evidence or as an accompanying application for digital therapies, Shrikanth Shetty, executive vice president and North America business head for life sciences and healthcare at HCL, said.

Companies looking to start a drug trial can try the solution as a proof-of-value package for six to eight weeks.

For companies that are in more advanced stages of clinical trials, Oracle and HCL are offering the new solution in a cloud-as-a-service format.

HCL claims it has the experience of supporting approximately 50,000 studies over 172,000 sites globally. HCL support centres can reportedly handle 400,000 requests from sites, investigators, nurses and subjects for clinical trials sponsored by large global pharmaceutical companies as well as small biotech or medical devices companies.