Revamped UI, Treatment Search and Doctor Search

Past few months, we've been hard at work re-designing the TrialX.com user interface to improve the user experience and creating the best clinical trials search engine for patients and their family members.  We went through a number of design iterations and informal usability tests to come up with the new design and the flow.
The major change is a step away from our original innovative "match matrix" interface to a more conventional search-based UI with faceted search ("facets" are those left side bar filters that you see for example in Bing and new Google search re-design). We found that our users felt more comfortable with conventional search UIs, and a guided search than manually entering their health information (although, one could always use their HealthVault or Google Health). The faceted search technology provides "cues" on side bar all the while showing the number of results in each category.

Home page (before)

Home page (after)

Match Matrix Interface (before)

Faceted Search Interface (after)

The search facets on TrialX are dynamically generated based on the content being searched, for example, Trial search results will show filters for "location", "study type", whereas Treatment search results will show filters for "trial phase" and "treatment type". Further,  our technology is able to generate disease-specific facets on-the-fly, for example,  cancer trials will have facets for disease stage (stage I, stage II, ...) or treatment status (on treatment, on observation,...) cancer trials.

Facets for Clinical Trial

Facets for Treatment

Disease Specific Facets  (e.g. Multiple Myeloma)

The Technology

The TrialX technology that powers the search and facet generation is based on generic semantic models that allows us to intelligently search across structured and unstructured data such as clinical trials, treatments or doctors and generating the facets on-the-fly for filtering the results.
Additionally, the filter values will under go semantic expansion during run-time, for example, a search for condition = lung cancer will bring up results for trials testing small cell lung cancer and non-small cell lung cancer. In implementing semantic technologies, such generic models slows down the performance of the real-time search engines, however, we've implemented some really cool optimizations and hacks that provide blazing fast response times. Try It.  

We realize that our technology is far from perfect and there is always a room for improvement -- we are dedicated to building the most awesome, useful web-based tools for enabling patients and researchers to find new information and connect with each other. As always, we'd love to hear your feedback as we make such new improvements to TrialX.

Cure Mania grips TrialX! Launching Cure Talk, Cure Bytes and Curepedia.

As the Superbowl mania grips the football fans across the country this weekend, we at TrialX have been gripped with the launch of new suite of tools to enable patients to learn about new cures and treatments. Clinical trials provide access to cutting-edge, potentially life-saving treatments, however the patients are often not aware about these treatments options. There are several resources on the web that provide information on existing drugs and therapies, however, there is not a single, comprehensive information resource for patients to learn about upcoming treatments in clinical trials. With this need in mind, we wanted to create an information resource for new treatments in clinical trials but we did not want to create yet-another-health-website with static list of web pages filled with medical jargon. People nowadays get their most of the information (and news!) from their friends on social networks, micro-blogs and blogs. So we decided to create 3 complimentary information resources: Cure Talk, Cure Bytes and Curepedia that combine all the elements of opinionated/social knowledge, real-time information, and referential/authoritative knowledge.

About new cures, treatments and healthier you.

Information for your well-being in 560 bytes (140 characters) or less

                  A wiki of New Treatments

These tools are currently in early-beta and we'll be sending out invites over new few weeks to the TrialX patient and investigator community to contribute to these resources and provide us feedback. Let us know if you have any suggestions or comments.

Welcoming 2010 with a Global Embrace. TrialX Launches in Canada, UK and India

We have had a great 2009 and we wanted to start 2010 by empowering people across the planet to benefit from clinical trials and medical research. We have received several queries from folks in the last few months asking if TrialX would be available in other countries. So we thought why not start a series of international sites starting 2010 (and quite literally; as i type this blog, CNN is showing folks screaming the countdown to 2010 at Times Square). So we are officially launching TrialX in three countries today - Canada, United Kingdom and India. We have had the TrialX Canada site (in partnership with SMD, a Canadian company) available for some time now. And its picking up a steady stream of visitors and users.

And today we turn on TrialX United Kingdom and TrialX India. We will be launching TrialX in another set of countries in coming days (hoping that we will be in countries spread across 5 continents!).







TrialX Canada










TrialX UK








TrialX India








It truly is exciting going global. By the way, in case you have been wondering, yes, we are heading out to celebrate the New Years Eve. (We are 3 hrs behind on the West Coast, so could watch the revelry in NYC as we post this)

A very Happy New Year!

The TrialX Team
Signing off from Pasadena, California