MACRO

• Mr. Gordon J. McVie
  

  Cancer Research Campaign
  Cambridge Terrace, 6-10 UK-NW1 4JL London United Kingdom	tel: 44 17 12 24 13 33 fax: 44 17 14 87 43 02 stm@eortc.be
  url:

• clinical trial offices which co-ordinate studies at regional, national, and European level
• clinicians in the hospitals, who treat the patients and provide clinical information to the clinical trials office.

The project aims at:

• the creation of a European network for Clinical Research for facilitating the international co-operation in clinical trials
• and the demonstration on that network of an integrated system based on clinical databases, remote data entry, study monitoring, and patient randomisation software, in order to assess the impact of telematics on data quality and on the speed of the clinical research process, as well as the administrative ease of participating in clinical research.

The approach is to integrate in a common telematics infrastructure commercial products and results achieved by previous research projects, e.g. EuroCODE and MARIA. The integration work will be performed by an industrial partner following the requirements of Health Care professionals. Oncology has been selected as the initial model. The demonstrator will compare several solutions based on MS-Windows front-ends and World Wide Web technology.

The use of telematics techniques such as Remote Data Entry and Remote Study Monitoring will facilitate the participation in clinical trials and therefore increase the enrolment of patients and accelerate the introduction of more advanced treatment strategies. Once effectively demonstrated, the MACRO Application will be commercialised for use by any interested parties in the Medical Community at large, this will include other specialised agencies such as that for AIDS research as well as those individual physicians who have the facility of hooking into this application, and the Pharmaceutical Industry.