Patient Recruitment
Clinical trials are conducted to collect data about the safety and efficacy of new drug and device development. Patient recruitment is the process of identifying patients who fit the criteria stipulated for a new drug’s clinical trial.
This process traditionally includes a combination of approaches and techniques which include manual querying of individual hospitals, engagement with disease advocacy groups and registries, and social media and advertising outreach, all with the aim of increasing enrollment into clinical trials. Often can be performed by an outsourced recruitment service provider. The patient recruitment sector has experienced rapid growth in recent years, particularly in response to the increasing number of global clinical trials.
It can consume a huge amount of time and effort to organize and extract all the data related to a clinical trial. Patient enrollment is one of the most important – and time-consuming – stages of the clinical trial process. Recruitment absorbs 30 percent of the clinical timeline, putting the original clinical process in jeopardy of missing deadlines.
Therefore, the pharmaceutical industry is seeking solutions which improve patient recruitment timeframes. The demand for patient recruitment rises dramatically every year, as the number of patients needed for trials grows radically. The leading cause of this acceleration of new clinical trials is the need to improve medical treatment and to reduce time to market.
Clinerion Patient Recruitment System (PRS)
Clinerion is the worldwide leader in medical data informatics, radically improving efficiency in patient recruitment, increasing effectiveness in clinical research and accelerating the process of drug development to ensure an earlier availability of medicines.
With key tools for protocol feasibility testing, site feasibility testing, and patient search, Clinerion’s solutions support patients and physicians in bringing early access to innovative medication; help hospitals to improve access to leading-edge sponsored trials, and enable life sciences companies to gain massive time and cost savings. Customers represent the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, healthcare and public sectors, as well as contract research organizations.
Clinerion’s flagship product, the Patient Recruitment System (PRS), is unique in the landscape of electronic health record-based solutions in offering a combination of multi-dimensional query definition, real-time search across multiple networked electronic health record systems made interoperable by the use of semantic and ontology methods, and a highly scalable hybrid cloud- and federated-local-installation-based platform. PRS accesses 100%, real-time information on aggregated patient populations, across institutions and geographies.
Clinerion PRS
Clinerion’s goal is bringing forward the best treatment and care for patients by ensuring faster availability of medicines. Clinerion’s Patient Recruitment System (PRS) improves efficiency in patient recruitment and increases effectiveness in clinical research to accelerate the development of innovative drugs. Read more about Clinerion’s vision…
PRS saves the clinical research industry months in time and millions in costs during drug development in reducing the need for study protocol amendments and in speeding up trial site selection and patient recruitment, i.e. finding enough patients within the target enrollment time. PRS increases the efficiency of the clinical trial process by enabling patient search and selection of sites with real and complete information (no randomness, or guesswork).
PRS identifies suitable clinical study candidates for a given protocol through automated screening of electronic health records (EHRs), using real-time data. This enables optimization of study protocols, more efficient site selection and faster patient recruitment, leading to significantly more patients being enrolled.
Experience shows that Clinerion’s PRS typically identifies 10 to 30 times more patients than those found through manual screening, and in a matter of minutes instead of the 3-6 months of a traditional manual search process.
- Patients can be identified for inclusion in trial in real-time, 24/7
- Clinical research trials find more candidate patients
- Hospitals receive more clinical trials
- Sponsors get faster, more efficient trials
Clinerion’s PRS is unique in the landscape of EHR-based solutions in offering a combination of multi-dimensional query definition, real-time search across multiple networked electronic health record systems made interoperable by the use of semantic and ontology methods, and a highly scalable hybrid cloud- and federated local installation-based platform.
Patient Recruitment System Toolbox
Code protocols, find patient populations at potential trial sites and identify candidates for clinical trial recruitment. All PRS tools are extremely user-friendly and accessible by web browser; no software installation is needed. Notifications are received by e-mail, SMS, or push messages.
Clinerion’s Patient Recruitment System finds more patients, faster, than conventional methods, and is based on real-life medical data. It comprises:
Protocol Designer – Protocol definition with five dimensions of the query and an unlimited number of criteria. Build your study protocol live, check it against real patient populations in real-time, and then refine the criteria to optimize it. Read more here>>
Site Finder – Real-time query of electronic health records at PRS-connected hospitals to find the distribution of relevant patient candidates. Identify the right hospitals to achieve the target number of eligible patients, and thereby minimize the number of trial sites for a study. Read more here >>
Patient Finder – Real-time identification of eligible candidate patients for recruitment. Primary investigators and study nurses at trial sites identify patients instantaneously, with 24/7 notification of new, eligible candidates. Read more here>>
PRS Benefits
Accelerating Clinical Research for Pharmaceuticals.
Developing new medicines is risky: it takes a whole lot of time and money, with no guarantee of success. Finding ways to improve efficiency, increase effectiveness and accelerate the process would generate huge savings in the cost of drug development and in the time needed to get medicines to the public.
Clinerion’s promise is to deliver radical efficiency savings to key clinical trials processes via high-technology, big data informatics solutions for health data. In the key areas of protocol feasibility testing, site strategy and site feasibility testing, and patient search, Clinerion’s solutions bring massive time and cost savings through access to 100%, real-time information on aggregated patient populations, across institutions and geographies. This leads to protocols being optimized using live data, finding 10-30 times more patients than through traditional methods, and getting site search results within minutes. Time-critical trials also become possible as the system runs in real-time, 24/7. Read more here>>
PRS Unique Technology
Clinerion applies intelligent, patented informatics methodologies to extract and interpret information from large amounts of electronic health records, aggregating healthcare information across institutions and geographies, and creating one single comprehensive real-time view.
Clinerion’s technology maps the terminologies of sponsors and trial sites, so that trial protocols can be consistently and effectively queried across many platforms, creating one single comprehensive view for protocol optimization, site feasibility and subsequent real-time patient recruitment. Clinerion provides the only patient recruitment solution in the market which combines:
- Multi-dimensional protocol definition with five dimensions of query and unlimited criteria
- Real-time search across multiple networked electronic health record systems made interoperable by the use of semantic and ontology methods
- A highly scalable hybrid cloud- and federated-local installation-based platform.
Clinerion’s Patient Recruitment System (PRS) only receives anonymized patient information from the hospital. This undergoes many complex processes inside PRS to bring data from a multitude of hospitals and information systems, and a plethora of local medical conventions to the same level and ensure that all networked hospitals can be addressed at the same level with one single query. Clinerion’s technology extracts, normalizes, completes and “cleanses” data from existing EHRs to ensure semantic interoperability between them, before indexing them. These many processes represent the expertise and know-how of Clinerion.
Clinerion’s system then can screen the EHRs, including coded information (for diagnoses, treatments, medications, etc.), data (e.g. demographics, lab values) and free text (such as narratives and reports). Eligibility criteria can be mapped between standard medical and hospital-specific terminologies, while free text is screened with the support of a natural language processing technologies. Read more here>>
Hybrid Network
The Clinerion Patient Recruitment System has a hybrid infrastructure, comprising a federated network of local installations and a secure, private cloud.
Clinerion’s Patient Recruitment System (PRS) uses a hybrid cloud infrastructure to search patients’ EHRs and identify eligible candidates for clinical research. With an ontology-based approach, PRS extracts unstructured data that fits specific criteria from connected hospitals, aggregates the information, and compares it across all electronic information sources using artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and other advanced informatics methodologies.
The PRS hybrid cloud architecture is driven by requirements for patient privacy and data security, scalability, and flexibility. PRS comprises two types of installations, PRS Nodes in local intranets, hosting patient data; and the PRS Cloud, which orchestrates the overall system and holds job requests (e.g. search query requests). Data are only sent via the intranet to the local PRS Node instead of to a central cloud. Read more here>>
PRS Network of Hospitals
Clinerion helps hospitals running sponsored trials.
Improving access to sponsored trials can give your patients and physicians access to the latest developmental drugs, enhance your hospital’s reputation, and increase hospital revenue. Once trial sites are identified and sponsors have reached an agreement with them to conduct trials, PRS enables the hospitals to find the specific patients for enrolment. PRS itself only sees aggregated, anonymized data, but the system allows validated hospital personnel to re-identify candidate patients.
Clinerion helps attract clinical studies to your hospital
Being part of Clinerion’s network allows patient populations at hospitals to be easily matched, live, against a clinical trial protocol by pharmaceutical companies. This increases the probability of receiving a trial and ensures that the site selection step gives an accurate indication of relevant patient numbers, thus reducing trial feasibility evaluation time.
Clinerion helps hospitals running academic research.
Patient Recruitment System (PRS) queries your own hospital information system to find more patients for your trials. And, as it accelerates patient recruitment, it also increases the efficiency of your operations and the number of trials your hospital can run.
From installation to protocol feasibility testing, to site selection, to online patient recruitment.
Clinerion’s Big Data analytics technologies and advanced user interface enable the coding of clinical trial protocols – with multiple dimensions of criteria – simply and quickly. These protocols can then be used to query electronic medical records within the hospital infrastructure, live and in real-time.
Finding patients within your hospital’s information systems in real-time ensures that you work with 100% information on patient availability and that even up-to-the-minute patients can be captured for enrolment. The Patient Finder tool in Clinerion’s PRS sends alerts when new candidate patients are identified.
And all without sacrificing the sanctity of patient privacy.
Read more about the key benefits
of Clinerion’s network of hospitals here>>
Join the PRS Network!
Typically, implementation is possible within 6 calendar weeks from time of data/contract availability.
Want to join Clinerion’s network? Contact Clinerion Now!
NEW PCT patent filed August 2017
Clinerion has filed an international patent application under PCT procedures for a new technology for patient search and identification based on the electronic medical records of patients held by hospitals. The “anonymized identification” (ANID) technology involves exclusively the use of anonymized data, ensuring the privacy and security of patient information. Read more here >>
