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MAGI ARTICLE Patient Locator Home
BROCHURE Patient Locator Is A Worldwide Tracers Company
Worldwide Tracers
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Locate Patients Lost To Follow Up How Our Service Works Note - Most clinical trials dictate that we are NOT to make contact with the patient and the patient's relatives, therefore this section on 'How Our Service Works' will make the assumption that your clinical trial will NOT allow us to make contact with the patient and those related to the patient. Patient Locator's experience locating missing people is put to the test when locating patients that are lost to follow up in a clinical trial. We have strict safeguards in place to maintain patient privacy and HIPAA compliance, therefore the manner in which we would normally search for a missing person is somewhat different; unless your legal department approves us to do so, we do NOT call relatives, neighbors, employers and others to determine where the patient is. Once you are ready to start sending lost to follow up patient cases to us, the first thing you need to decide is which method you wish to use to submit the information about the patient. We have a secure server website that allows you to submit patient information over the internet. The security is the same as if you were submitting credit card information over the internet. This is the most convenient and confidential means of submitting patient information, however you can also use email or fax. To view our 'Patient Locator Search Form' follow this link, 'Complete and Submit Here' , and hit your back button to return to this page. Upon receipt of your submission, we begin searching using the patient's social security number and additional information provided. ALL OF THE PATIENT'S INFORMATION IS HELD IN STRICT CONFIDENCE. Because we are licensed, we are held accountable for all of our actions; confidentiality is ALWAYS maintained. The search process can take between one to two weeks depending on the workload and difficulty of your case. If your study requires a rush, we can accommodate most needs if we address the issue in advance. International cases normally require a longer period of time to locate. When we have completed our search we will transmit our results to you either by email, fax or mail. You tell us in advance who we transmit locate information to and how we transmit the information. The locate information we provide is: the most recent address found; the most recent phone number found; name, address and phone number (when available) of any relatives found during our search. In some cases we can provide a living status report by interpreting activity data to determine when the patient was last know to most probably be alive. Because we are licensed investigators, we have available to us over 11 membership only databases of information. These valuable information sources are available ONLY to licensed companies and law enforcement. We do use some internet based searches, but only for secondary information, never to locate your patient. When the information is returned to us from our databases, it is important to know how to interpret it. Many dates and addresses, if interpreted incorrectly could give a false reading. Many times, patients with common names can have information commingled with unrelated parties. That is where our experience and expertise is important. We are not an information broker, we unravel the data and report the facts. Many times we are able to report from our data when a patient was last known to be living simply by interpreting the activity of the data we receive about the patient. This is very important information should you have a patient who no longer wishes to participate in your study. DEATH RECORDS Death indexes are the most important searches to a clinical trial and probably the most widely misunderstood. There are two national death indexes, the Social Security Death Index and the National Death Index. The Social Security Death Index is available to anyone over the internet. We have used several different access points through several of our membership information databases for the Social Security Death Index and we have used the free sites; our experience shows that the membership databases are updated more frequently than the free sites, it stands to reason. The one thing that must be known about this index is that that deceased must have had a claim filed on their social security number in order for their death to have been listed. The National Death Index is nationwide. In order for it to financially be effective, there must be a need for a high number of searches. There are some qualifications that must also be met. Patient Locator cannot provide this affordably to our clients, the pass-through costs are simply too high. However, we are monitoring this situation regularly for changes to the current status. Patient Locator uses our reports to determine when activity for the patient might have come to a halt. Of course, we use several avenues of searching the Social Security Death Index to insure that we have accessed the most recent listings. Finally, when available, we search the patient's last state and county of residence for vital record indexes and newspapers for obituaries. Short of the National Death Index, our method of searching provides us a good opportunity for locating a death record when necessary. DOCUMENTS
You never have to be concerned about an individual's privacy being violated in order to obtain the needed information. Patient Locator keeps every step of the search legal and confidential - we are licensed professionals, regulated and held accountable for every search we conduct. WE CAN HELP Our Offices Are Located In Heart Of Dallas & Ft. Worth, Texas P.O. Box 511 - Mansfield, TX 76063-0511
*patientlocator.org is licensed as
Worldwide Tracers, Inc.
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