Proxemis – which stands for ‘primary care’, ‘Oxford’ and ‘EMIS’ – is a new joint venture created by the University of Oxford and EMIS and was announced at the Outsourcing Clinical Trials conference in Barcelona, this week, on 4 May 2023.
By leveraging market-leading point-of-care systems used and trusted in over 10,000 healthcare organisations across the UK, Proxemis will integrate research delivery into day-to-day care to address long-term conditions and health inequalities.
By focusing particularly on clinical trials that are suited to be conducted in primary care settings, Proxemis aims to make it easier for both patients and clinicians to participate in research, help find better treatments for long-term conditions and deliver research that is truly representative of the UK population.
Proxemis will be able to help design a study specifically to target relevant populations, particularly around a chronic condition, recruit patients for the study and enable a successful clinical trial.
The business will have a board consisting of three directors from EMIS: John McCormack, Alex Eavis and Lucy Mackillop and three from the University of Oxford: Professor Richard Hobbs, Bernard Taylor and Linda Naughton.
Professor Richard Hobbs , Head of Department of the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford and Proxemis Director, said:
"We have launched Proxemis to accelerate our innovation and investment in digital health. The initial focus will be to produce an end-to-end service for commercial partners in community-based digitally enabled trials, building on our world-class expertise, enhanced during COVID with our national platform trials. With EMIS’s dominant position as the UK’s largest provider of electronic health records and their novel research investment in their analytics platform, we aim to attract major investment to the UK in trials of new interventions for patients that are delivered quicker, less expensively, and more reliably. We also expect to develop tools and new ways of working that rapidly benefit our university research."
Read more about Proxemis here .