Enabling Clinical Trial Recruitment & Internal Research
Overview
A large regional health system sought to expand its precision medicine research by launching investigator-led clinical studies and collaborating with external research partners. However, they faced challenges in making their clinical, genomics, and imaging data readily usable for research studies. Their data was fragmented across multiple systems, requiring significant manual effort to identify research-ready cohorts.
Additionally, without a structured, queryable dataset, the system struggled to identify eligible patients for clinical trials, analyze treatment response trends, and contribute data to external research collaborations. The team needed a scalable solution that would allow them to harmonize their internal data while enabling controlled access for select external research collaborations.
Challenges
Data Silos Prevented Research Use: Genomics, imaging, clinical, and pathology data were unstructured and difficult to query.
Inefficient Trial Recruitment: Without a streamlined way to query their own data, patient identification for investigator-led studies was slow and labor-intensive.
Limited Data Usability for Research: Research teams lacked structured, standardized datasets to support internal studies and collaborate with external organizations.
Regulatory & Privacy Barriers: Traditional data-sharing raised compliance concerns, preventing external research partnerships.
Why They Chose datma
After evaluating multiple solutions, the health system opted to pursue a phased approach to onboarding datma.FED. They started by leveraging the datma.BASE and datma.COHORT components to integrate, harmonize, and structure their data, while also equipping their clinical operations team with an easy-to-use tool to support clinical trial recruitment initiatives. These products were selected in part due to datma’s out-of-the-box support for abstracting data from pathology, radiology, and clinician notes, optimized to meet the health system’s specific needs by datma’s implementation team. Once the accuracy and utility of the data were validated internally, they were able to participate in datma.FED to support external research collaborations, offsetting license and implementation costs in the process.
Solution: datma.FED
By implementing datma.FED, the health system was able to ingest, standardize, and structure their clinical, genomic, imaging and pathology data, making it immediately usable for internal and external research purposes. This transformation enabled rapid patient cohort discovery for internal clinical studies, significantly reducing the time required to identify eligible patients. Additionally, the system facilitated research collaborations by allowing external researchers to run secure, privacy-preserving queries without requiring raw data transfers. Throughout this process, datma.FED ensured full compliance with HIPAA and institutional governance policies, allowing the health system to maintain complete control over data access while advancing its research initiatives.
Results & Impact
Faster Patient Identification enabled more efficient recruitment for investigator-led trials.
Seamless External Collaborations through secure, federated data-sharing for external research partnerships while maintaining strict access controls.
Research-Ready Datasets: enhanced internal study quality and facilitated collaboration with external researchers.