Phase Forward Inc., a web host and integrated data management solutions provider, has introduced what it has deemed as time-saving functionality to solve the industry challenge, concerning recoding clinical data.

"Our customers tell us that ensuring adherence to dynamic clinical term dictionaries presents a formidable challenge. We have developed Central Coding for InForm 2.0 in direct response to this input. The tools and functionality provided in Central Coding for InForm 2.0 are designed to help our customers reduce the time required to meet this challenge", explained Steve Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Phase Forward.

The new release of Central Coding for InForm, is said to reduce the time and effort required to update clinical study data to the latest industry standard dictionaries. Central Coding for InForm 2.0, is a new release of a web-based application optimized to code clinical data within Phase Forward's InForm Integrated Trial Management electronic data capture (EDC) product to industry standard dictionaries.

Most companies conducting clinical trials must map the variety of study data terms they have captured to a set of common terms contained within industry standard dictionaries, such as the World Health Organizations Drug Dictionary (WHO-DD) and the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Affairs (MedDRA), for adverse events and medical coding. Sponsors continue to invest heavily in clinical process re-design, staffing and system applications to support the dictionary coding management process with the goals of improving consistency.

The ''coding process'' offered in many EDC systems can be time-consuming because simplistic coding algorithms force coders to manually match the majority of their study data to standard terms. In addition, the regularity of newer dictionary versions makes it extremely difficult for companies to recode their clinical data to the latest standards once the coding process has been initiated using older dictionaries.

The Central Coding for InForm 2.0 application gives companies the tools to address these important challenges. In addition to providing an advanced, centralized multi-trial coding environment that streamlines the initial coding process, Central Coding for InForm 2.0 now offers tools to reduce the manual coding required to recode clinical data to reflect the latest standards in multiple dictionaries.