Dr Michael Kolodziej on How Technology Will Improve Patient Access to Clinical Trials

Technological advances will lead to improvements in clinical trials and greater participation in trials by patients, explained Michael Kolodziej, MD, national medical director of managed care strategy at Flatiron Health.

Transcript

How can improved technology improve patient access to clinical trials?

The consensus, I think, especially among community oncologists, is that the reason that so few patients get on clinical trials is that the system isn’t really set up for the community oncologist to succeed. The trials are too picky, they’re too labor-intensive, and, frankly, they cost money to perform. Technology can solve a lot of the problems that face successful participation in oncology trials. Everything from patient identification through identification of correct clinical characteristics that document that the patient is, in fact, eligible for the trial through—what I think historically and for old people like me, we remember the really thick binders—case report forms the ability to document the necessary details about the patient’s clinical course while on the trial, that really were administratively a tremendous burden.

So, I think technology could really facilitate successful execution and not only in the construct that we are accustomed to thinking about it, but if you take it a step further and if you start thinking about just-in-time clinical trials or clinical trials that are dependent on a rare biomarker—patient identification becomes much easier because there’s no longer a needle in the haystack phenomenon. We like to think that we understand how all of these drugs work and what the outcomes are going to be, but things happen and being able to query a system to look at alternative outcomes or a more comprehensive picture of the effects of the therapeutic intervention on the patient. I think it’s just a great opportunity. Nobody wants to stay where we are in clinical trials, it just doesn’t work.