Another method of recruiting patients into clinical trials that should be valuable is to use such things as a patient’s health records, lab test results, and insurance claims data.

Obviously there are privacy issues that come into play for each of these, but if that aspect can be covered effectively, tapping into the information available would be a very effective means of locating potential trial participants through comparing their data against a trial’s eligibility criteria.

Here in the UK we have the NHS – which you might think would be a useful source of health records data that could be used for sourcing patients.

Unfortunately, however, the data held by the NHS is not centralized or digitized, so it’s of limited practical value for our purpose.

Once again, then, the approach of utilizing patients’ health data is one that should work well for trial recruitment, but falls short of being as good a solution as it could be.