Penn Medicine to expand use of EMR software to find clinical trial candidates

Penn Medicine is moving ahead with a tool that flags candidates for clinical trials in its electronic medical record systems after finishing a successful pilot program that drove clinician referrals.

Penn Medicine is doing a second pilot with its Penn Research Trial Advisory software that includes two more clinical trials. The software is programmed to look for specific patient criteria that fits current clinical trials, and will deliver a pop-up alert to medical staff entering patient data into the hospital’s electronic medical records system.

There’s a link in the alert that can send clinicians to a website to ensure that it’s appropriate to the patient.

Brian Wells, associate chief information officer in health technology and research computing, said there was an 87 percent increase in clinician referrals using the software.

Wells said that previously, clinicians would have to find time to manually sort through medical records for potential candidates using their best judgments. The alerts tells them about suitable candidates more efficiently.

The health technology team implemented the alert in October 2010 and the program went live in January 2011.

Tracy Christie, a senior technology analyst in health technology, said they are developing a communication and marketing plan for the program, along with a procedure for researchers to apply to use the tool.

Wells said the team had spoken with the Cleveland Clinic and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who already have an EMR system in place for clinical trials.

“I would like every trial to use this across the board. We are working really hard to try to eliminate barriers between clinicians and researchers,” Wells said.

The program is designed to improve the efficiency of recruiting patients for trials, not only to improve the candidate pool, but also to save clinicians the time of manually going through records on top of a full workload. The health technology department will work with practices, researchers, practice leaders and study coordinators to facilitate the program.

The nine to 10 specialty practices that are being considered for the second pilot will be narrowed down to two and are expected to be set up in December.

Recruiting patients for clinical trials can be a significant challenge not only for medical institutions, but also for pharmaceutical companies as well.

Health IT is bristling with innovation with companies developing new tools to help hospitals utilize the heavy volume of data produced by electronic medical records.