The eClinical Forum participates in the EHR4CR (Electronic Health Records for Clinical Research) project and is responsible for the development of scenarios for the platform and business model. This project was initiated in March 2011 under the Innovative Medicines Initiative which is a joint undertaking between the European Union and the pharmaceutical industry association EFPIA. EHR4CR is one of the largest public-private partnerships aimed at providing adaptable, reusable and scalable solutions for re-using patient level data from Electronic Health Record systems for Clinical Research.

The EHR4CR platform and services will:

• Enable re-use of electronic health records to do better upfront protocol optimization and planning. Today… A third of protocol amendments are avoidable; over 40% of amendments occur before first patient first dose
• Provide tools for sites to identify candidates for clinical trials by electronically searching EHRs in order to improve patient recruitment which is one of the biggest challenges for clinical research.Today… 50% per cent of clinical trials fail to achieve the target recruitment rate; Studies show that manual process misses 27% of suitable candidates
• Connect healthcare and research systems to improve the capture and exchange of clinical trial data.Today… Over 40% of clinical trial data is entered manually into both healthcare and research systems; Transcription errors increase the workload for monitoring, querying, and responding to queries; Complex processes must be put in place to manage the ‘source’

 The project completed in 2015. During 2014 the project engaged in activities for externalisation of the platform and services.