Conducting clinical trials over the internet: feasibility study.

The possibility of conducting clinical trials entirely on line is an enticing but relatively unexplored medical application of the internet. The penetrance of the internet in the population offers the possibility of rapid recruitment of participants, and technological advances enable instant collection of data in a secure and confidential manner. These attributes could theoretically accelerate the evaluation of many compounds by cutting costs and reducing the duration of each study. Many components of an online trial, such as recruitment websites and electronic data capture technologies, have been separately described, but few attempts have been made to integrate these into a single process, and no study has evaluated the performance of such an endeavour.