Sydney-based clinical trials technology company Clinrol is expanding its focus beyond patient recruitment, with the aim of tackling operational challenges faced by clinical trial sites.
Clinrol co-founder and CEO Arjun Bhat told Pulse+IT that excessive administrative workloads were currently driving away eligible patients from enrolling in studies – but to address this, his company had spent the past year developing a new platform, Clinrol Connect to reduce inefficiencies in trial site workflows.
“We’ve very much solved the top of funnel aspect where we can find patients and pre-screen them and refer them to clinical trial sites,” Mr Bhat said.
“But what we’ve identified is these trial sites are essentially overburdened with administrative tasks and tasks that aren’t really related to ensuring that a patient is enrolled into a clinical trial.”
Mr Bhat said Clinrol’s experience showed that around 30 per cent of referrals failed to convert into enrolments despite being suitable candidates – because of “the broken systems and the overworked nature of some of the clinical trials that are being run at some of these sites.”
He also pointed to study coordinators spending the majority of their time on administrative work.
“We know that 60 per cent of the time that study coordinators spend at sites is basically on admin work and not so much looking at or caring for patients or checking if they are eligible for that clinical trial.”
Mr Bhat said Clinrol Connect combines multiple systems commonly used by trial sites – including spreadsheets, customer relationship management platforms and clinical trial management systems (CTMS) – into a single workflow platform.
“We’ve essentially brought in multiple systems that a clinical trial site would use. Legacy systems such as Excel, CRMs that aren’t even related to our industry, disconnected CTMS systems or CTMS systems that were released 20 years ago.
“We’ve combined all of those elements into one platform called Clinrol Connect, which allows a study coordinator or recruiter on site to basically control, have oversight from end to end in terms of the recruitment journey of a patient.”
He said the approach was not necessarily aimed at replacing existing CTMS platforms, but instead to integrate with them.
“We definitely do replace legacy systems like Excel, outdated CRMs and systems that aren’t really meant to be used in the health space and clinical trial space,” Mr Bhat said.
“Systems like CTMSs where it’s very hard for clinical trial sites to move away from, our approach is that for now we will integrate with them and work with the workflows that sites currently have.”
Co-founder Ram Bhat said the company spent months working directly with study coordinators while developing the platform.
“Every time we bring a new customer on board, we actually sit down, do some deep workflow reviews with them, see how they would actually use it, and then figure out what systems that they should continue using or what we integrate with.”
Arjun Bhat noted that Clinrol used AI primarily for repetitive administrative tasks, while keeping human oversight for clinical decisions.
“When it comes to things like where there needs to be clinical decisions, clinical oversight and in terms of patient care, our mindset is that there needs to be a human in the loop and we’re not trying to replace that important aspect,” Mr Bhat said.
The platform automates tasks such as pre-screening, patient communications, reminders and engagement tracking.
Meanwhile, a “sentiment tracking” feature analyses communications between sites and participants to identify when a patient may be disengaging from a trial.
“The sentiment tracking understands how interested a patient is in a clinical trial – and while they’re in a clinical trial as well, the system basically tells the staff at the site if the patient, for example, is losing interest in the trial.”
He said the platform was particularly useful for studies attracting large volumes of interest, such as obesity trials involving GLP-1 medications.
“A clinical trial site in New South Wales could have 5,000 interested leads come in. We can essentially automate that whole process – to bring it down to let’s say 100 people, which saves hours and days of work for the study coordinator.”
Mr Bhat also said that AI could improve rather than diminish patient experiences by providing support outside normal clinic hours.
“Clinics work nine to five, usually Monday to Friday and most people would work similar hours,” he said.
“Implementing AI triage systems like we do with our pre-screening system, it actually gives more optionality to patients and it gives them a better opportunity to actually understand the clinical trial, show that they’re interested and they want to join.”
Mr Bhat also said delays in contacting potential participants often resulted in lost enrolments.
“Our experience is, we could send x amount of interested patients to a clinic and they might not reach that pool of patients for a week, two weeks. And by that time, they might lose interest and that reduces conversion overall.”
Ram Bhat said early results from Clinrol Connect deployments included three times faster patient engagement, up to 60 per cent less time spent on manual coordination tasks and almost a 40 per cent reduction in patient dropouts.
He said Clinrol had also helped reduce recruitment timelines for a recent adenomyosis study.
“We actually helped compress what was expected to be a six-month recruitment period to a couple of weeks.”
Clinrol currently operates across Australia, New Zealand, much of Southeast Asia, Europe and North America, with the United States now its second-largest market after Australia.
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