We want you to live a longer, healthier life. As a Mayo Clinic Health System patient in La Crosse, you can participate in clinical trials that are coordinated by the Clinical Research Department. Through clinical trials, which involve volunteers, researchers can better understand how to diagnose, treat and prevent diseases or conditions. Clinical trials help bridge research and patient care by evaluating therapies, drugs and diagnostic tools to drive discoveries into clinical practice. Clinical trials are different than medical care. When you visit your physician, he or she diagnoses and treats your current illness or condition. During clinical trials, researchers are trying to gather new knowledge that will help them improve medical care for people in the future.

During clinical trials, researchers learn if a new test or treatment works and is safe. Treatments studied in clinical trials might be new drugs or new combinations of drugs, new surgical procedures or devices, or new ways to use existing treatments. Find out more about the five phases of noncancer clinical trials on ClinicalTrials.gov or the National Cancer Institute's phases of cancer trials.