Acurian Inc., a leading, full-service provider of global patient recruitment and retention solutions, announced  that it has reached an agreement with a top five pharmaceutical company to use the highest encryption and security standards for managing sensitive patient data, particularly data handled within Acurian’s Oracle- and cloud-based computing platforms known as Acurian Recruitment Manager and Acurian Retention Manager.

The agreement is based primarily on Oracle’s Advanced Security Option (ASO) software to further ensure that data storage and transfer capabilities required in a global patient recruitment and retention platform are fully secure. These data include patient information, which ultimately is the foundation for clinical trial data used in worldwide regulatory submissions. Although the company’s platform was already a tightly closed system,  Acurian agreed to enhance the level of security to meet new demands from a key pharmaceutical customer.

“While other service providers claim to meet complex data standards, most are too small and lack the financial and technical resources to truly comply with the industry’s unyielding security requirements,” said Roger Smith, senior vice president of Operations. “To our knowledge, no other patient recruitment provider can protect its clients’ interests in this fashion.”

According to Acurian’s chief privacy officer, Andrew Fichter, a data breach today has greater implications than in the past. “Data breaches can damage a brand’s image, lower a stock’s value, and make the community-at-large very uneasy. Between international and social media sources, news travels to an information savvy public at blinding speed. Even the slightest affront to the public trust can go viral before a company has a chance to gauge its potential impact. It has the same effect as a contaminated product.”

The company stated that an increasing number of pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device customers are requiring a detailed and documented level of rigor around data security and patient privacy.

“We welcome the scrutiny because we feel it is a differentiator for us,” offered Smith. “We have literally invested tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure, personnel, procedures, and systems so that we can collect, store, and transmit data that sponsors and regulators classify as highly-sensitive. It’s clear that any supplier unable to meet these expectations will be unable to do business in accordance with the policies and procedures of large pharma especially, but with any company that expects to adhere to Good Clinical Practices.”