For individuals affected by a disease and interested in participating in a clinical trial, the ClinicalTrials.gov website does not fully meet their needs.
- The search functionality is limited and complicated
- There is no way to send someone info for future trials that they would match to
- There are many observational trials that are not listed on ClinicalTrials.gov
For the Parkinson's disease community, the Michael J. Fox Foundation has developed Fox Trial Finder (FTF) which parses the ct.gov RSS feed for pd trials and matches volunteer accounts to trials using a matching algorithm of several data points (location, controls accepted, medications, etc).
Several disease foundations have expressed interest in FTF's functionality as a means to better promote clinical trial participation opportuities amongst their community. This open source project's goal is to build out a simplified version of FTF that can be deployed to multiple foundations without large setup and maintenance overhead.
Other Similar Solutions For Reference:
I am new to Ruby on Rails so pull requests are welcome! You can also take it offline by emailing me at mwenger at michaeljfox.org
- Import clinical trial data from more sources. http://apps.who.int/trialsearch/Default.aspx - (an international version of ClinicalTrials.gov)
- Add ability for trial teams to submit their trial to be added to the site. Add admin user role to approve these submissions.