Epic Life Sciences to Perform Clinical Trial Matchmaking
Electronic Health Record (EHR) vendor Epic Systems has announced its Life Sciences Program, which will connect clinical trial and research participants with DME companies, pharmaceutical companies, and providers. Life Sciences will focus on more than just matching patients though, as integration with a patient’s provider-side experience will give researchers access to more data, reduce duplication, and overall increasing the efficiency of new therapy development.
To get things off the ground, Epic is going to start in the clinical matchmaking space. Since researchers today are often using systems that are built solely for their study, communication and data exchange have been difficult.
Epic says there are already providers signing up for the platform, which allows them access to tools that will match the organization with clinical trials that are appropriate for their patient population and test that it’s a good fit with validation queries. Eventually insights about patients who might qualify for a program will come directly to the point of care using predictive models.
While there’s no shortage of text on the amount of alert fatigue clinicians are facing, by having a common set of data that triggers eligibility, underrepresented groups will be more likely to be made aware of, and participate in, these studies.
It’s a great initiative, and one that should help promote health equity while at the same time improving the speed of research. The only problem with the initiative is that it’s reliant on data being up to date and accurate. There are certainly some patients whose entire medical histories will reside within Epic, but for many of us, our medical histories can become fractured and confined to PDF scans or faxes rather than showing up in an EHR as discrete data.
This is why we designed our HealthyData Platform to ensure that no matter how a document comes into your organization, it comes in with all of the relevant clinical data identified and matched to a patient, order, and encounter.
It’s not feasible for clinicians to be able to wade through media files to identify longitudinal values that would qualify a patient for a research study, but it’s also difficult for them to do to ensure that patients get put on proper maintenance plans and that Best Practice Advisories are triggered appropriately.
Rather than relying on manual data entry staff, faxes, and scans for such crucial information, why not reach out to Extract, and we’ll show you just how impressive the data and clinical decision support associated with it can be.
