Calcium Launches Medical Education Solutions Division
Calcium, the growing healthcare marketing agency, announced another advancement in their offerings with a new division dedicated to providing medical education solutions called Vitamin MD. The division will be led by Lauren Lazar, MD, current Executive VP/Medical Director, and Brad Quosig, current VP, Client Engagement Lead, as they aim to provide a critical range of disease state and brand-related educational services. The new capabilities are Calcium’s response to a growing industry need to help providers along their learning journeys. Content developed by Vitamin MD will aim to stimulate engagement around science, agents or compounds, and medical technologies as well as advance knowledge and skill around different therapeutic areas and approaches, ultimately leading to better health and business outcomes.
Dr. Lazar stated, “Medical education should be an integrated ecosystem that’s aligned with core brand strategic imperatives.” Innovative educational approaches can “serve the important needs of both providers and patients, while also delivering the measurable results clients are seeking.”
Solutions for Sponsors of Rare Disease Drug Development
Ergomed, a clinical research organization focused on rare disease drug development, announced the establishment of a new consortium known as the Rare Disease Innovation Center. Consisting of global industry-leading partners and internal subject matter experts, the Rare Disease Innovation Center will be dedicated to finding solutions to the many challenges rare disease drug sponsors face, including the rarity of patients to participate in clinical trials, a limited amount of expertise, heterogeneity of indication, lack of established endpoints, and poorly understood natural history. The ultimate goal is to provide global solutions that allow sponsors to reduce clinical trial timelines, optimize patient experience, and bring effective rare disease therapies to market more quickly.
The Rare Disease Innovation Center will also use Ergomed’s Site Advantage operating model, specifically designed to provide specialized support to research sites and patients participating in rare disease clinical research. The consortium will help biotechnology and pharma sponsors focused on rare disease to strategically guide and plan drug development programs; design intelligent clinical trials; use technology to identify and retain rare disease patients; leverage the Ergomed Patient First approach to reduce patient burden in clinical trial participation; ensure that patient voices are captured and incorporated throughout the clinical development lifecycle; and finally, use real-world evidence for control arms, patient selection, biomarkers, end point selection, patient registries, etc. The Rare Disease Innovation Center includes several partners such as Sensyne Health, Trialbee, mdgroup, Medidata, a Dassault Systèmes company, THREAD, Rare Patient Voice, PatientWing, ClinOne, and others.
AristaMD Acquires Preferral
AristaMD, the digital health company that supplies eConsult services to connect primary care providers (PCPs) with timely, documented specialist insights, can now offer referral management, analytics, and document routing to improve patient access to specialty care through the acquisition of Preferral. Preferral’s referral management platform that optimizes the selection of specialists for face-to-face referrals will help AristaMD in its mission of using technology to facilitate collaboration between healthcare providers.
“Today’s referral paradigm is broken. It is estimated that 20 million clinically inappropriate referrals are sent each year and that more than 20% of referrals are misdirected. In addition, up to 50% of referrals are often unfulfilled,” AristaMD CEO Brooke LeVasseur said in a statement. “All of these dynamics lead to patient frustration, inflated costs, and poorer patient outcomes. Electronic referral management and eConsults are simple-to-implement tools that improve the quality of referrals, increase patient compliance, improve provider communication, and reduce unnecessary spend.”
AristaMD can now offer a comprehensive, end-to-end, referral platform that meets the needs of payers, health systems, accountable care organizations, PCPs and specialists. Besides expediting the referral-to-specialists process and helping patient outcomes by securing appointments for patients to receive specialist advice when and where they need it, the company hopes to diminish the effects of social determinants of health such as language barriers or lack of childcare, by eliminating the need for face-to-face specialty visits more than 70% of the time.
Preferral Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Jon Gautsch, will now be Sr. Vice President of AristaMD. He explains, “Many of the enhancements to the Preferral platform were developed based on customer requests and feedback. I can tell that the AristaMD team has the same focus on designing solutions that meet the needs of its customers. We will continue to listen to customers to ensure new features address current and future challenges to patient care delivery.”
