Pharmaceutical Product Development(PPD) and HealthCore, have established a collaboration that will enable both companies to further expand their services in the pre- and post-approval research market.

The collaboration combines PPD's clinical trial design, health economics and outcomes research (HEOR), medical affairs research and epidemiology services with HealthCore's strengths in HEOR, innovative real-world research designs and its robust research-enabled electronic health care data environment.

"The goals of optimizing reimbursement and increasing payer and patient value are becoming more dependent on biopharmaceutical companies' ability to provide high-quality evidence of how products will perform for patients in a real-world setting," said Mr Michael Pollock, vice-president of real-world outcomes at PPD. He said, "With the collaborative expertise of PPD and HealthCore, particularly in planning, designing and implementing pragmatic clinical trials, we hope to set a new standard for the quality, cost and speed of real-world evidence generation that can help optimize patient outcomes and enable our clients to better demonstrate the true value of their products and the return on their investments in new product development."

The collaboration allows lifesciences companies to engage in one contract with combined services from PPD and HealthCore that has the potential to cover product research in both pre- and post- approval settings. Both PPD and HealthCore will be able to provide biopharmaceutical companies analyses of medical claims data and electronic health records necessary to understand the utilization and impact of their products and to design appropriate pragmatic clinical trials that address payers' needs.

"By combining clinical and economic information and leveraging our access to large health care provider networks, we will have a much more robust view of how patients use and react to different therapies," said Mr Marcus Wilson, president of HealthCore. He added, "This gives us an opportunity to produce relevant information that can facilitate decisions and speed to market those products that provide the most value to patients, payers and life sciences companies alike."