Developing new treatments for diseases depends on clinical research studies and 57% of Americans say they would be interested in participating in a clinical trial. However, almost half of all studies never reach their recruitment targets.

In order to connect patients and researchers, Novartis, Pfizer and Eli Lilly are partnering in the U.S. to provide a new platform to improve access to information about clinical trials. The platform will enhance clinicaltrials.gov and provide more detailed and patient-friendly information about trials, including a machine readable “target health profile” to improve the ability of healthcare software to match individual health profiles to applicable clinical trials. Patients can search for trials using their own Blue Button data. To preserve data privacy, de-identified Blue Button data, used only as an “index to search,” will not be stored anywhere outside of the patient’s application.

The platform launch is planned for early 2014 with a starting database of about 50 clinical research studies from the participating companies. The platform will be open on both ends: other sponsors of clinical research studies may upload information about their trials, while software companies develop tools to deliver this information to interested patients.