Clinerion's new tool gives patients with rare conditions access to precision medicine

Clinerion developed a Patient Recruitment System (PRS), which connects to and leverages existing electronic medical records to facilitate real-time patient recruitment for clinical trials. The biotech company has today announced a new service and use case for its PRS. The PRS Patient Finder tool can now be used to give patients requiring personalized, precision, or orphan treatments access to new medicines earlier, and give physicians additional options in treating them.

With the new service, patients in “hard-to-reach” populations, such as patients with rare diseases and patients requiring personalized treatments, can be matched with new, targeted treatments. As patients with rare diseases are de facto very rare, connecting the patient to an innovative treatment is often very inefficient without a technological solution in place. It becomes even more challenging if not all patients suffering from a particular rare disease will benefit from a treatment, but only a specific sub-population. Such patients need to be identified using genetic testing and there is currently no organized process to find all the patients eligible for a specific drug.

“Industry feedback shows a need for matching drugs with patients,” says Tigran Arzumanov, Clinerion’s Head of Sales, “this new approach allows the identification of patients eligible for targeted, specialized treatment, while maintaining patient and physician privacy.”

Real-time alerts
The PRS Patient Finder tool is able to query hospital information systems across Clinerion’s connected hospitals in real-time, using complex combinations of criteria based on demographics, diagnoses, medication, laboratory values, radiology and other procedures. The tool provides automated alerts for hospital staff to identify patients entering hospital systems in time and enroll them for clinical research trials before traditional treatment is initiated. Real-time alerts are critical for treatment of time-sensitive clinical conditions, such as pain or infectious diseases.

The approach involves two steps: first running de-identified queries across Clinerion’s network of participating hospitals, identifying hospitals and physicians who provide care for potentially eligible patients. Second, activating Patient Finder at the hospital for the physician to identify those patients who correspond to the profile defined for the innovative drug treatment. The process of using Patient Finder can include steps of data gathering and performing tests which were not previously done, serving as a management tool to ensure all eligible patients are identified.

Clinerion patient recruitment system found compliant with privacy directives
Patient data security is built in to Clinerion’s PRS. Within PRS, patient privacy is maintained and compliant with international standards such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). PRS runs behind the firewalls inside the IT infrastructure of a hospital. Patient data is de-identified (pseudonymized) while on hospital-controlled infrastructure, using encryption keys exclusively under hospital control. Patient data is never removed from the hospital premises; the physician holds the keys for re-identification and remains the decision maker on patient treatment.

About Clinerion
Clinerion is an international technology services company offering highly scalable electronic patient recruitment solutions to increase efficiency and quality in clinical research. The company's Patient Recruitment System connects to and leverages existing electronic medical records. Following international privacy and confidentiality standards, Clinerion's solutions pseudonymize, enrich and normalize those records and facilitate real-time patient recruitment for clinical trials.

(Press release)