Lethal Lag Time: Defining and Advocating
November 24, 2009
Lethal Lag Time is described in the in the e-Patient While Paper (page 87) in the context of bypassing the lag time by using patient-initiated research. But are there other ways to accelerate traditional clinical trials or provide other alternatives to answer research questions. A search of the term “clinical trial failures” yields only 7 results on Pubmed. Clinical trial recruitment yields on 29 results. Don’t we need more study of research to understand some of the problems in clinical trials, such as, failures and recruitment problems? Are there ways to examine each phase – protocol development, funding, recruitment, even publication etc.? The Obama administration is providing some DOD grants which are simple application processes and rapid decision cycles. Why can’t a similar program be applied to medical research grants?
Finally, is there a way to inject the urgency of a term like Lethal Lag Time into the medical research discussion including the professional literature? Not sure how we can do this but Participatory Medicine and e-Patient involvement are key. Watch for more blog posts on this topic.
