“The National Library of Medicine is embarking on an extensive modernization effort of the world’s largest public clinical trial registry and results database, ClinicalTrials.gov, with the COVID-19 response underpinning the importance of the multi-year project…”
“The agency plans to continue engaging with stakeholders, incorporating feedback given from their recent RFI, as well as develop a strategic roadmap and enhance its internal business processes this year to achieve its goals that began late last year.”
“Improvements for the website fall under three baseline categories: website functionality, information submission and data standards. The agency also plans to implement user testing for those enhanced features within the next two to five years, with the endpoint being to advance health science and make research study information easily understandable and searchable for potential participants.”
“The 20-year-old website has experienced an increase in traffic due to a strong interest in clinical studies that could help the pandemic, Wolinetz said. This includes searches for publicly available information regarding clinical trial updates and results for treatments that many federal agencies and news outlets report on, such as the first FDA-authorized treatment for COVID-19, remdesivir. The agency is making sure to update the latest terms and synonyms for COVID-19 search results for participant study enrollment, Wolinetz said.”
“Additionally, although the novel coronavirus was discovered relatively recently — with the first full sequence of the virus published in NLM’s GenBank in mid-January — there are over 900 clinical trial studies for COVID-19 listed on the website, NLM Director Patricia Brennan noted…” Read the full article here.
Source: NLM Highlights Essential Role of Clinical Databases in Pandemic – By Faith Ryan, May 4, 2020. GovernmentCIO.
