How Site Explorer’s Enhanced Capabilities Can Improve Diversity in Clinical Trials

Why Is Diversity Important in Clinical Trials?

The saying, “one size doesn’t fit all” can be applied to many aspects of life, including clinical research. When engaging patients, it’s paramount to have diverse clinical trial representation since different individuals from different backgrounds are likely to have different outcomes to treatments. 

Historically, certain racial and ethnic groups have been underrepresented in clinical trials, leading to gaps in our understanding of treatment effects across diverse populations.

At Verana Health, we are committed to bridging these gaps by leveraging real-world data (RWD) from the American Academy of Ophthalmology IRIS^® Registry (Intelligent Research in Sight), the world’s largest specialty society clinical data registry in all of medicine, consisting of data on 80 million de-identified patients from 15,000 contributing clinicians. Exclusive access to this vast amount of RWD can help to better inform and optimize clinical trial design and execution.

What Is Verana Health’s Site Explorer Application?

Our Site Explorer application is a testament to our commitment to connecting the dots of diversity in clinical trials. Designed to revolutionize protocol optimization and site selection, Site Explorer empowers trial sponsors and contract research organizations to make data-driven decisions with ease.

By providing a comprehensive view of prospective study sites, potential referral sources, and de-identified patient populations, Site Explorer ensures that the right trial sites with the right patients are selected efficiently and effectively.

A newly enhanced capability of Site Explorer is the ability to identify practices based on patients within specific underrepresented racial or ethnic groups. The added functionality allows users to gain an in-depth view of cohort representation at the site level, providing insights that can help set informed enrollment targets for specific demographic subgroups.

This data is derived from the structured fields of electronic health records (EHRs) within the IRIS Registry. Available data from structured fields includes:

• Patient demographics – age, sex, and race and ethnicity
• Diagnosis – ICD-10, ICD-9, SNOWMED, custom codes
• Practice data – trial experience, indications of active and past trials, number of clinicians, etc.
• Clinician data – subspecialty
• Procedure data – CPT, HCPCS, and custom codes

The intuitive interface of Site Explorer, which doesn’t require coding expertise, also offers curated codelists from structured and unstructured EHR data to simplify searching for diagnoses and procedures. With curated terms and concepts, Site Explorer allows users the ability to:

• Access code sets with nearly 300 pre-defined codes for diagnoses and procedures.
• Quickly build precise patient cohorts based on protocol eligibility criteria.
• Easily search Verana Health’s curated data, enhanced by artificial intelligence, to extract key variables from clinical notes within EHRs.

From semi-structured fields, users can view patient outcomes, such as visual acuity and intraocular pressure.

These capabilities empower users to make data-driven decisions with ease, streamlining study planning to ensure the right trial sites with the right patients are selected based on inclusion and exclusion criteria.

By investing in and enhancing Site Explorer, we’re equipping research teams with the tools needed to design diverse clinical trials that reflect the real-world nature of patient populations, ensuring that future treatments are informed by and beneficial for all.