Beyond the EMR: New Technology That Supports Clinical Research and Trial Enrollment

Clinical trial enrollment is often challenging for hospitals and other clinical trial sites. In fact, industry research shows that nearly 70% of all clinical trial sites fail to meet enrollment targets.

The good news is that new technology can help change this dynamic, making it easier and faster for hospitals to identify eligible clinical trial patients.

Clinical trial sites across the country, such as Sharp Grossmont Hospital in San Diego, are already experiencing the benefits of this technology.

What’s different about this new technology?

While many hospitals rely on manual identifications from their electronic medical record (EMR) to enroll eligible candidates, this process can be extremely time consuming.

New technology, like VigiLanz Research, integrates with a hospital’s EMR to find patients for clinical trials in real time.

It does this by applying intelligent rule sets—tailored specifically to a clinical trial’s unique protocols—to automatically search the hospital’s entire EMR and alert researchers when an eligible candidate is identified within the system.

Three advantages of this new approach

Here are three advantages of using new technology to complement electronic health records for clinical research:

Advantage #1: Confident identification

Failed clinical trials often stem from the inability to meet enrollment numbers, particularly when those trials have extensive and specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. Data-driven tools, such as VigiLanz Research, sift through EMR data in real time to identify all eligible candidates based on rules built on clinical trial eligibility criteria. This ensures clinical trial coordinators are more easily able to identify all patients who qualify, and can rest assured that no eligible candidates will be missed.

Advantage #2: Earlier enrollment

Many clinical trials are time-sensitive, such as requiring that trial enrollees receive a new drug within a specific time frame after a medical event has occurred. Once that time frame has closed, those patients no longer qualify for the trial. VigiLanz Research automatically identifies eligible patients within the hospital as soon as they become eligible, making it easier for research coordinators to enroll them in time.

Advantage #3: Efficient processes

Using VigiLanz Research to complement the EMR makes processes much more efficient for clinical research teams by providing:

• A dynamic worklist that coordinators can use to view or modify patient eligibility status in real time
• Automatic alerts that notify coordinators any time an eligible candidate is located within the hospital network
• Enterprise-level reporting that coordinators and leaders can use to evaluate study performance and easily evaluate potential clinical trials

The future of clinical trial enrollment technology

VigiLanz Research enables faster identification, earlier enrollment, and efficient processes, making trials more accessible to patients and more effective for providers.

By empowering researchers to screen more qualified candidates, VigiLanz speeds up the clinical study process. For hospitals, this increases the likelihood for clinical trial enrollment success, and for sponsors, this potentially saves millions of dollars and helps get products to market faster.

Most importantly, VigiLanz connects real people with opportunities for life-changing treatments that could help them live longer, healthier lives.

To learn more about how VigiLanz helps hospitals find patients for clinical trials in real time, visit https://vigilanz.com/research/.