A new partnership between a creator of web-based learning and collaboration systems and a pharmaceutical industry education specialist was announced this morning.

Centra, a provider of business software solutions for eLearning and real-time collaboration, will be working with ePharmaLearning (ePL) to provide customized solutions to pharmaceutical and healthcare professionals. The new service, called ClinicalCollaborator, offers a library of clinical content modules and eCollaboration services to deliver Web-based meeting capabilities and self-paced training content to pharmaceutical professionals. Providing greater access to ePharmaLearning's team of subject matter experts and extensive library of therapeutic and workflow-specific content, ClinicalCollaborator enables pharmaceutical professionals to share information on clinical trials, regulatory issues, and project reviews while documenting the entire process through Centra's record and playback capabilities.

This year alone, pharmaceutical companies will spend hundreds of millions of dollars hosting face-to-face meetings to manage the geographically dispersed internal and external study staff responsible for conducting their clinical development programs. This has become an expensive and timely process that pulls the physician investigators and study staff away from daily patient care, and the internal team away from project responsibilities. With the implementation of travel restrictions by many companies, ePL offers an alternative to traditional face-to-face meetings. As a further benefit, ePL services help clients meet FDA Good Clinical Practice guidelines, which mandate documentation of the participation and completion of this training.

``By customizing a Web-based platform and content library specifically for the pharmaceutical industry, we make the design and delivery of clinically focused online meetings and eLearning sessions faster and more effective than ever,'' said Lance Converse, CEO for ePharmaLearning. ``After a careful analysis of vendors, we found Centra to have the most appropriate collaborative platform for our highly regulated industry. Many sessions we deliver such as online Investigators' meetings and project update meetings are highly interactive and need to be fully documented, recorded and archived. Centra was willing to work with us to develop solutions that meet the strict needs of our pharmaceutical clients.''

Used by more than 775 companies, government agencies, and universities worldwide, Centra's scaleable software solutions are based on CentraOne, a thin-client Web collaboration platform. Leveraging the core capabilities of CentraOne, Centra offers a suite of compatible, real-time Web collaboration products, content creation tools, and knowledge delivery systems that can be installed on-site or accessed through Centra's ASP. Centra's products - including interactive Web meetings, virtual classrooms, and large-scale conferences - ensure universal access to users through firewalls and proxy servers, and deliver IP audio conferencing, streaming video, application sharing, and dynamic multimedia over low-bandwidth network connections through a standard browser interface.

``With a growing customer base in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, including deployments at Blue Cross Blue Shield, Merck, Schering Plough, Novartis, Aventis, and HCA Healthcare, we look forward to working together with ePL to expand awareness for our joint solutions in this important market,'' said Alan May, Centra's Vice President of Strategic Alliances. ``By combining our respective competencies, we can offer pharmaceutical professionals the most comprehensive solutions available for clinically focused training and information, while helping to reduce cost and improve cycle time.''

To learn more about ePharmaLearning, click here

To learn more about Centra, click here