Neurological Foundation of New Zealand

In the July 2009 grant round, the Neurological Foundation approved funding for Dr Peter Bergin’s international collaborative pilot study which set up an internet-based platform to recruit patients for epilepsy drug trials. The platform, called EpiNet, is now functioning and is able to be accessed by adult and paediatric neurologists from anywhere in the world.

In this second study phase, the EpiNet study group, led by Dr Bergin and involving an international collaboration of epileptologists, will undertake a study to validate both the EpiNet study group and the EpiNet platform before undertaking clinical trials. The group will circulate 50 fictitious case histories to doctors who have expressed interest in participating in the EpiNet project, and ask them to enter details into the EpiNet database, using standard and internationally approved epilepsy classification systems. Investigators’ results will be compared. As well as confirming that investigators ‘speak the same language’ globally, the study will also determine how much variability there is when classifying individual cases using the classification schemes. At the same time, the group will undertake steps to confirm that the database and systems procedures are robust.