ELECTRONIC CLINICAL-TRIAL PROTOCOL DISTRIBUTION VIA THE WORLD-WIDE-WEB - A PROTOTYPE FOR REDUCING COSTS AND ERRORS, IMPROVING ACCRUAL, AND SAVING TREES

Clinical trials today typically are inefficient, paper-based operation s. Poor community physician awareness of available trials and difficul t referral mechanisms also contribute to poor accrual. The Physicians Research Network (PRN) web was developed for more efficient trial prot ocol distribution and eligibility inquiries. The Medical University of South Carolina's Hollings Cancer Center trials program and two commun ity oncology practices served as a testbed. In 581 man-hours over 18 m onths, 147 protocols were loaded into PRN. The trials program eliminat ed all protocol hardcopies except the masters, reduced photocopier use 59%, and saved 1.0 full-time equivalents (FTE), but 1.0 FTE was neede d to manage PRN. There were no known security breaches, downtime, or c ontent-related problems. Therefore, PRN is a paperless, user-preferred , reliable, secure method for distributing protocols and reducing dist ribution errors and delays because only a single copy of each protocol is maintained. Furthermore, PRN is being extended to serve other aspe cts of trial operations.