ReSearch Clinical Services Signs Exclusive Agreement With Healthdemographics.

BLUE BELL, Pa.--(BW HealthWire)--May 18, 1999--

ReSearch Clinical Services (RCS), a site development company that focuses on accelerating the clinical development process, announced an exclusive agreement with Healthdemographics, Inc., the country's leading patient mapping and healthcare demographics software company, to jointly develop a database that further enhances its proprietary investigator recruitment and qualification service - SiteSelector.

RCS will integrate its SiteSelector database that provides detailed information (including current capabilities and past clinical trial performance metrics on over 30,000 clinical research investigators) with Healthdemographics' Avenir HealthPac platform that maps disease specific patient populations across the U.S. to assess healthcare demographics and utilization down to zip code precision. The jointly developed investigator and patient mapping database will offer pharmaceutical companies a new methodology to conduct more strategic investigator selection. This powerful new system will be released at the Annual Meeting of the Drug Information Association in late June 1999.

Healthdemographics provides the most accurate current and five-year forecasts of patient utilization of health care services available. Tim Garton, President of Healthdemographics, a Medirisk company, stated, "The combination of this data and our Avenir platform will produce the most advanced investigator/patient mapping program available offering pharmaceutical sponsors the ability to accurately select the best possible investigator for a study. The ability to match the highest caliber investigators located in areas that are densely populated with protocol specific eligible patients will significantly increase trial success. Through use of our Avenir HealthPac, we know how often patients visit their physicians and can even predict which type of communications medium consumers will most likely seek out for healthcare information, including clinical trial participation."

RCS maintains the industry's most comprehensive database of clinical research investigators detailing their past clinical trial experience, training, equipment, etc. This database is the cornerstone of RCS's SiteSelector service which provides investigator recruitment and qualification services for pharmaceutical sponsors. The service allows for optimal recruitment and contracting with the most appropriate investigators for upcoming clinical trials saving weeks to months in the start-up process.

Lance Converse, CEO of RCS explains, "Healthdemographics has developed the most comprehensive and powerful patient healthcare utilization and disease mapping database programs we have seen. The relationship moves us a giant step closer to providing our pharmaceutical clients with the most accurate investigator recruitment decision-making capabilities available. The ability to select the most experienced, high quality investigators located in areas with the richest disease specific patient populations will allow our clients to make more educated decisions on investigator selection - ultimately resulting in shorter development cycles." Converse adds, "It seems prudent to plan for patient enrollment concerns from the outset. Selecting the most promising investigator is only one facet in the equation - ensuring that when enrollment issues surface, and they will - we will know where and how to reach the potential 'local' population of eligible patients which makes this product unique to the clinical services industry."

RCS is an industry leader in experienced investigator recruitment and new site development services. RCS also trains, develops, and exclusively manages the clinical research initiatives for select managed care and physician practice management organizations in an effort to meet a critical industry shortage of physicians capable of conducting high-quality clinical research. Through the use of its proprietary SiteDeveloper service, RCS also provides individual practices with the industry's leading software systems to manage the trials and provides supplemental services such as on-site GCP training, quality assurance monitoring and business development to ensure successful "top quality, highly productive research sites."