Lags, delays, and failures in clinical trial recruitment, enrollment and retention hamper the rate of drug development and medical progress. The work proposed in this contract submission addresses clinic-facing challenges in clinical trial recruitment and retention. The overall goal of the contract is to build, test, and deploy at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University and it’s community affiliated sites a software tool, OnTrial, that improves provider awareness of patients potentially eligible for trials, clinical trial patient eligibility evaluation workflows, team communication of trial recruitment activities, tracking of recruitment efforts and successful retention of patients. OnTrial’s innovation is the scalable, secure, and systematic review of patient medical records which are parsed for trial matching metrics using the same approach and data model for trial criteria parsing. The 1-to-1 structuring of patient and trial data is the fulcrum upon which the innovation rests. In this contract effort, OnTrial will include breast, thoracic, head and neck, lung, gastrointestinal, and genitourinary patients and trials. All patients being seen by participating providers will be systematically considered for trial eligibility without bias. It is expected that OnTrial will significantly improve trial recruitment overall as well as the diversity of trial participants. OnTrial software will be deployed on Vizlitics’ Cancer Insights Platform.

Prostate cancer is the leading cancer diagnosis in men (not including skin cancer) and has high survival rates (98% at 5 years), resulting in an estimated 3.2M US men currently living with prostate cancer. However, data shows follow up among prostate cancer patients remains a significant challenge. This project will create a cloud-based clinical decision support system to automatically monitor, track, and optimally classify prostate cancer cases for triage by applying advanced algorithms to curated medical data.

Each oncologist in the US spends on average $83,000 each year in pre-authorization process costs to get insurance approval for cancer patient treatment plans, which is a major contributor to higher overall medical costs. To address this unmet need, this proposal aims to build OncoPath, a prototype tool in non-small cell lung cancer for oncologists to automate the process of pre-authorization documentation. OncoPath will move the current manual, labor intensive, and error-vulnerable documentation process to a digital experience providing a first-of-a-kind visual representation of the NCCN Guidelines® with patient data overlaid to easily review, select, and document the patient information, treatment selection with NCCN supporting evidence, and any clinical narrative.