Thirteen hospitals in New York could see major investments in electronic patient records pay off in spades. Pfizer ($PFE) and four other large drug companies aim to pay the hospitals $50,000 to $200,000 every time the hospitals mine their databases and come back with a list of qualified patients for the drugmakers' clinical trials, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported.

As pharma groups search for ways to make trials recruitment more efficient, the Partnership to Advance Electronic Patient Research (PACeR) has a pilot project in New York to improve the usability of electronic patient data for clinical researchers. Oracle ($ORCL) and Quintiles Transnational ($QTRN) are two firms helping to build the system required for the project, and large drug companies such as Pfizer, Roche, Merck ($MRK), Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ) and Bayer are backing the endeavor. The patient-recruitment effort, which could generate $75 million per year, gets started this month, according to the Bloomberg article....

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