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Global Presence

ePRO solutions deployed worldwide – Experience in Africa, Asia, Australia, North America, South America and Europe

Dr. Pornel

About Us/History

Symfo has a long history in terms of patient data collection process. The idea started in the late 1980s, when Dr. Bruno Pornel, Symfo’s co-founder was working as a medical director for a Top 10 pharmaceutical company. He noticed that the patient data collection process was delivering data of very poor quality. After starting his own Gynecology practice and acting as a primary investigator for menopause clinical trials, he quickly understood that the problem was coming from the way patients were reporting in their diaries. He was confronted with the “Parking Lot Effect”; observing patients completing their diaries while waiting in the parking lot before entering his practice.  Clearly the patients were filling in data last minute as opposed to the pre-determined intervals outlined by the protocol.

In 1991, Dr. Pornel started developing a symptoms and events recorder that was focused on the area of menopause. He developed a simple, but effective tool consisting of 3 buttons that recorded sweating, hot flashes and irregular menstrual cycles.  The Internet was almost non-existent at that time and data transmission was performed using a cable linked to an old 64kB PC.

Symfo was created in August 2000 when co-founder Serge Bodart joined Dr. Pornel.  Development was started on a more sophisticated tool that could meet the requirements from any Therapeutic areas. Because data transmission was quite an issue among the ePRO vendors, Symfo adapted the acoustic transmission that was used at that time for transmitting ECG data to Symfo’s ePRO systems. This solution proved to be very successful and is still used today, along with GPRS transmission (mobile phone technology) allowing Symfo to deploy trials anywhere in the world.

Later on, with the need for more quality of life data, Symfo developed a new application that ran on Palm OS. More recently the application was transferred to Windows Mobile OS systems.