CHICAGO – Merge Healthcare announced Thursday that Omnicare Clinical Research, subsidiary of Omnicare, Inc., will implement its Clinical Imaging Management System (CIMS) as part of its end-to-end solution for image management of oncology, cardiology and ophthalmology clinical trials.

Omnicare will use the integrated imaging solution, in tandem with with Merge EDC clinical trials application, to conduct an upcoming study for a pharmaceutical company specializing in molecular diagnostics for oncology research. This global colorectal cancer trial will collect and review 2,750 exams from 550 patients at 40 sites over five years.

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Officials say this streamlined solution, built on Merge CIMS, was selected for its ability to lower costs, reduce the time to deliver results by up to 10 times relative to industry standards, and provide complete transparency to all of the stakeholders in the trial.

“We needed a comprehensive image management solution to support our customer’s imaging requirements for this new clinical trial, as well as for upcoming studies,” explained Mark Penniston, senior vice president, biometrics, data management, clinical writing and eTechnologies at Omnicare Clinical Research. “The Merge CIMS solution is a critical component of this because it provides a completely new level of workflow efficiency to a clinical trial. We feel we can now offer best-of-breed solutions to our sponsor organizations, particularly those in image-intensive studies such as oncology.”

Along with Merge CIMS, Omnicare plans to leverage AG Mednet’s image transfer technology and leading radiology expertise from Intrinsic Imaging to build a complete virtual imaging core lab solution, officials say. The Merge CIMS role is to automate the full workflow of image submission, image storage in a vendor-neutral DICOM archive, and image review and analysis. This allows the imaging component of any study to be completed more efficiently and economically, while also integrating fully with any EDC system to provide end-to-end visibility to all data in a clinical trial.

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"Merge Healthcare's CIMS solution is the industry’s most advanced workflow management solution for imaging trials, owing to enabling technology that unlocks the use of imaging in clinical trials," Nadim Daher, senior industry analyst at Frost and Sullivan, has noted.

“Merge is delighted to be selected as the enterprise imaging partner by a forward-thinking CRO such as Omnicare Clinical Research,” said Merge Healthcare CEO Jeff Surges. “The role of imaging in clinical trials is accelerating, and Merge CIMS leverages our core expertise in both imaging and clinical trials to bring this market needed workflow tools. We anticipate that this upcoming study will be the first of many joint projects with Omnicare."