Research Participant Tracking (PTrax)

Why is participant tracking important?

Research participants are at the center of everything we do in clinical research. Nothing is more important than protecting the safety and rights of participants. A robust and interactive participant tracking system helps investigators, study coordinators, clinicians, and oversight bodies such as the IRB to follow participants throughout the research process and ensure that their safety and rights are protected.

The Research Participant Tracking application will capture demographic information gathered during the informed consent process and track participant status throughout the lifecycle of a study for each participant that is consented under the Mayo Clinic IRB. By drawing on many other Mayo databases, the participant record can be populated with essential research study and financial/billing information. Research Participant Tracking will interface with other Mayo Clinic tracking systems (such as the patient electronic medical record) for real-time status updates and data sharing, as well as MIRIS for integrated billing support.

Benefits of Research Participant Tracking

Integrated participant tracking offers benefits to study participants, investigators, sponsors, collaborators and clinicians, including:

• Enables better management of the informed consent and re-consenting processes
• Reduces data entry effort and eliminates the need for each study team to build its own tracking system
• Facilitates compliance and reporting efforts, including minority inclusion, FDA, NIH and IRB continuing review
• Promotes patient safety by flagging the patient electronic medical record (EMR) with information about clinical trials/studies in which he/she is participating