The Citeline Awards have recognized UBC & Seqster’s innovative collaboration as a shortlisted finalist for the Best Patient-Facing Technology Initiative Category in 2023. This is the second year in a row that UBC has been a finalist in these awards after being shortlisted in the Clinical Research Team of the Year category in 2022.
In March 2022, UBC and Seqster launched an ongoing, longitudinal, real-world treatment outcomes study in the US of patients receiving treatment for a rare type of benign tumor in the joints that is disabling physically, mentally, and socially. The study objectives are to collect longitudinal patient-reported outcomes and clinical data on treatment patterns and clinical outcomes. Given that the patient population is a rare disease population receiving a medical therapy that is only accessible via managed distribution, site recruitment and site-based patient enrollment were challenging, and the research was impractical to conduct via sites exclusively.
UBC and Seqster partnered to amend the study into a direct-to-patient approach for enrollment using a secure, digital platform to access patients’ medical records. Once registered, patients are provided access to their patient portals through the SEQSTER solution to bring their electronic medical records (EMR) into the dashboard for the research team to perform data abstraction. This allows any eligible patients to be able to participate in the research without the need to enroll the patient’s treating physician as a site in the study. In this model, UBC can recruit 100% of the eligible patient population regardless of their geography or proximity to a site.
In this rare disease population, this methodology was fundamentally vital in enabling the research team to enroll a total number of patients that would generate meaningful analysis. Furthermore, this model reduces the burden on the healthcare provider for performing data abstraction as this activity is performed by a central team. The synergy between UBC and Seqster in putting Patients First created a natural fit for this partnership and allowed this research, which would not have been feasible in a traditional, site-based model, to succeed.
UBC is proud of the early results of this partnership and the recognition it has achieved with the Citeline Awards. To learn more about UBC’s lifecycle solutions in rare disease, click here. To dive into how we partner with biopharma to generate comprehensive evidence of product safety and effectiveness.
