CTI Grant for Electronic Patient Recruitment System in Clinical Trials

A key reason for high costs, poor performance, delays and termination of clinical trials is the current process of patient recruitment: It is manual and paper-based; unsystematic, not real-time, labor-intense, costly, and regularly misses potentially eligible patients due to unnecessary delays in patient and disease identification.

The electronic patient recruitment system (ePRS) of ii4sm aims at replacing the current manual patient recruitment process for clinical trials by automated screening of patients in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) that match the study eligibility criteria. The methodology applies innovative and interdisciplinary informatics approaches that combine:

1. computer science and software engineering techniques (e.g., Natural Language Processing, and text analysis) with
2. biomedical terminologies and vocabularies using semantic approaches, and
3. examines the application in a real-world patient recruitment project, which obtains real time data from an electronic health record.

EPRS can now be developed further thanks to a grant by CTI. ii4sm's partners in the ePRS project are the Clinical Trial Unit of the University Hospital of Basel and The Institute of 4D Technologies (i4Ds) of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland.

ii4sm – International Institute for the Safety of Medicines provides solutions for drug development and other life science information challenges via software and services. The company was founded in 2008. CEO is Ulf Claesson.