Contract research organisation Quintiles has combined its digital patient resources, including two online patient communities, into a single unit.

The company's new Digital Patient unit will bring together MediGuard.org and ClinicalResearch.com to offer its pharma clients a more efficient patient recruitment service.

The new unit will be headed up by Quintiles' senior vice president David Coman, who said patients would also benefit from the changes.

“By unifying our digital patient resources, we will be better able to deliver proper content to patients while providing our customers with a more efficient channel to find the appropriate people who may be interested in participating in clinical, observational or disease management programmes,” he explained.

The free medication monitoring service MediGuard was launched in 2007 and has more than 2.5m registered users.

ClinicalResearch, whose ultimate aim is to persuade more people to participate in clinical trials, has accrued a smaller following of 165,000 registered users since its launch in October 2009.

Quintiles appeals to Google Health users

Quintiles is hoping the MediGuard arm of its new unit will appeal to former users of online personal health record service Google Health, which was closed on January 1.

Announcing its decision last year to kill off the service, the search giant said Google Health was “not having the broad impact that we hoped it would”.

In a June blog post the company said: “There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven't found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people.”

Quintiles' Coman said: “Google Health was a brilliant concept, but in order for online patient services to work, there must be a clear benefit to patients who enrol in them. MediGuard's contribution is an easy-to-use service for patients to support a healthy lifestyle, many of whom are taking multiple medications for various conditions.”

But Quintiles is not alone is hoping to attract Google Health users.

One of the strands to a planned healthcare IT joint venture between GE Healthcare and Microsoft will see applications build around Microsoft's own online health record system HealthVault. Microsoft has also been working to allow Google Health users to easily import their data to HealthVault.

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