April 24, 2017
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
AUSTIN, Texas – Tom Dorsett is looking to change the way patients are recruited to take part in clinical trials.
Although there is a long history of patients responding to advertisements on various media platforms to participate in clinical tests, Dorsett, founder and chief executive officer of ePatientFinder, believes there is a more efficient way. Dorsett and his colleagues at ePatientFinder have developed the Clinical Trial Exchange platform that allows physicians and clinical sites to leverage electronic health records (EHR) to generate patient referrals and populate trials faster and at a more cost efficient rate. The platform uses a three-tier filtering process that leverages both the patients’ EHR data and information on ongoing trials based on geography and specialty.
In an exclusive interview with BioSpace, Dorsett said potential trial volunteers feel more comfortable learning about trials that could benefit their treatments from trusted physicians rather than an ad on late-night television or on social media platforms.
“We want to be able to leverage the ocean of data that’s out there,” Dorsett said. “We’re client centric, but we are also benefitting the patient as well. So far there hasn’t been a technology to facilitate this process.”
Dorsett said a patient’s physician should be at the center of the process to determine whether or not a patient might be a good fit for a trial. In traditional screening processes for clinical trials, Dorsett said trial coordinators may see a lot of patients, many of which aren’t diagnosed with the relevant disease state, which will disqualify them from the trial. He said trial coordinators may receive a “deluge of referrals” that creates more work. Founded in 2013, ePatientFinder’s platform connects doctors and EHR data in a way that facilitates patient screening to produce more predictable and reliable results. Bringing in a more accurate patient population in clinical trials will mean a faster rate of innovation in healthcare, which benefits everyone, he said.
Not only that, but the speed of using a platform like ePatientFinder to find trial patients will cut down on trial costs, he said. His platform helps in recruiting the most fitting patients, but will also save time on the “patent clock” for companies that take products through the regulatory process. He said the three-stage screening process, creates the “highest quality referrals in the business.”
While that seems efficient, ePatientFinder provides more than just a modernized pathway to patient recruitment. The service also educates physicians about the plethora of clinical trials being conducted and provides them with information to see if patients they are treating will be a good fit. But, Dorsett said the EHR data will only go so far when it comes to recruitment. There is still a stringent screening process that asks pointed questions to determine eligibility.
“There’s highly objective criteria that’s not always addressed in the data, even though it’s becoming richer and richer,” he said.
The idea is to take what ePatientFinder offers and become a game changer in the life sciences industry.One other step that Dorsett wants to see is greater diversity in clinical trial patients.
“It’s getting more and more important as time goes by, particularly as medicine becomes more precise,” Dorsett said of a need for diverse patients. “You look at how it (the experimental drug) impacts men, women and different ethnicities. Different ethnicities respond to drugs differently. It creates an issue if you don’t have that diverse trial population.”Dorsett said the use of genetic data is becoming more prevalent. He predicted it will be the next revolution in medicine, with the precision medicine movement serving as a leaping point.
What ePatientFinder is doing is fairly new. Dorsett said his company is essentially blazing a trail.
“There’s not another company we can look at and see how they’re doing,” he said.
Because they’re breaking new ground, Dorset said creativity is prized at ePatientFinder. In order to be a member of the “tribe” of 30, creativity is an essential, he said.
But those tribal numbers could be growing, considering the ground ePatientFinder is breaking. Dorsett pointed to relationships with multiple companies, must unnamed, but he did say they are working with AllScripts to leverage clinical trial recruitment and precision medicine programs. Coming from an IT background in life sciences, Dorsett said he and others in the company with similar backgrounds have been leveraging those personal connections they’ve made throughout their careers to grow the company.
“We’re growing at a brisk pace and have caught the attention from some major life science companies,” he said. “We’ve just scratched the surface with what we’re doing.”
