From left: Stephen Ellis, Senior Director, Informatics, The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine; Steven Coca, DO; Judy Cho, MD, Ward-Coleman Chair in Translational Genetics, and Director, The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine; and Girish N. Nadkarni, MD.
Clinical researchers in the Division of Nephrology and The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine are leading a new initiative within the Mount Sinai Health System to dramatically accelerate the prescreening process to identify eligible candidates for clinical trials.
The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is the first academic institution in the nation to partner with Clinithink, a software developer that has designed a tool known as CLiX ENRICH, a set of algorithms capable of quickly processing large volumes of quantitative and qualitative data from electronic medical records, including physician notes.
Traditionally, researchers spend weeks or months manually sifting through medical records to locate highly eligible patients for potential trial enrollment, a process that increasingly requires submission of qualitative data that can only be extracted through careful analysis of physician notes. “This software ultimately creates customizable lists of patients sorted into tiers, starting from the most eligible patients to least eligible,” says Steven Coca, DO, Associate Professor of Medicine (Nephrology) and executive sponsor of program evaluation.
In a recent proof-of-concept demonstration for an ongoing trial of a drug for patients with diabetic kidney disease, CLiX ENRICH found 97 highly eligible patients in less than three weeks compared with just six patients found over three months using standard methods.
Says Girish N. Nadkarni, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Nephrology) and lead investigator for the CLiX ENRICH evaluation: “Typically, the problem is not enrolling patients quickly enough. Now, our problem is having sufficient number of staff to enroll all of the eligible patients.”