Revolutionizing Clinical Trials with AI and Real-World Data: Verana Health’s Innovative Approach

The recent recognition of our CEO, Sujay Jadhav, as one of PharmaVoice’s 2024 Clinical Trial Pros, confirms both our commitment to pursuing new horizons in clinical trials and our focus on health equity and inclusivity.

Verana Health is dedicated to transforming the way clinical trials are designed and executed by leveraging real-world data (RWD) and cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI). Our solutions are built to streamline clinical trial processes, accelerate patient recruitment, and ensure more reliable, equitable outcomes, advancing both medical research and patient care.

Here’s how we’re utilizing real-world data and AI to transform clinical research across every phase, from trial design to patient recruitment.

Trial Design with Precision

At the heart of every successful clinical trial lies its design, which is crucial for minimizing costs, improving efficiency, and delivering reliable results. Designing a trial that is both scientifically rigorous and operationally feasible is challenging, and poor trial design can lead to delays as well as inconclusive results. At Verana Health, we’ve developed a solution to address these challenges and design more efficient and effective studies. 

By harnessing an extensive, clinically-rich RWD network in ophthalmology and urology, we offer data-driven trial design that enables sponsors to model diverse patient populations and optimize trial protocols. Access to refreshed data can help life sciences companies select better endpoints, comparators, and eligibility criteria to ultimately improve trial retention and avoid delays. Our curated data can also be used to support innovative approaches, such as external control arms (ECAs) which leverages historical RWD as a substitute for traditional control groups. This approach thus reduces the number of participants required and eliminates the need for randomization, which is often seen as a deterrent for study participation. 

Through our exclusive partnerships with leading medical societies, we have access to data from more than 90 million de-identified patients and 20,000 clinicians, which allows us to create trial designs that are not only efficient, but also representative of real-world clinical practice. Our AI-powered platform enables the analysis of this data, ensuring trial designs are both innovative and adaptable to emerging trends in patient care.

Protocol Optimization and Site Selection

Life sciences companies often face challenges in optimizing their trials and site selection strategy, which can hinder study success. Verana Health tackles these challenges by providing protocol optimization and advanced site selection services through our proprietary data.

By leveraging RWD and site-level information, we assist trial sponsors and contract research organizations (CROs) in tailoring protocols to align with their target populations and help them identify and engage with the practices treating these patients. This enables more precise site selection and increases the chances of a successful trial.

With our ability to provide a refreshed picture of patient populations, we are not only improving the speed of recruitment, but also enhancing patient diversity and representation—a critical factor in ensuring that the results of clinical trials are broadly applicable to various populations. Our approach can help sponsors and CROs optimize criteria and site selection to ensure underrepresented populations have the opportunity to participate in research that directly impacts their care. 

By tapping into a vast database of ophthalmology practices, our Site Explorer platform can help identify those practices that are likely to enroll participants more efficiently, based on their patient population, past research experience, geographic location and more. Likewise, our data can help sponsors and CROs ensure that protocols are realistic, reducing the risk of deviation during the study, and ultimately leading to more reliable and actionable results.

Accelerating Patient Recruitment

One of the biggest challenges facing clinical research today is patient recruitment. On average, more than 80% of clinical trials are delayed with difficulties in finding eligible participants being a key barrier. At Verana Health, we are solving this problem through our RWD insights and AI-driven patient recruitment technology, such as Verana Trial Connect, which utilizes structured and unstructured RWD to identify eligible patients with precision.

Our access to vast electronic health record (EHR) data, including structured fields and unstructured free-text notes, allows us to quickly and accurately identify potential study participants who fit the precise inclusion and exclusion criteria set by the protocol. Verana Health’s role as the exclusive data partner of specialty clinical registries in ophthalmology and urology allows us to deliver these patient lists directly to trial sites without the need for additional practice level agreements or data access, streamlining recruitment and minimizing the burden of patient pre-screening for sites.

Prospective Evidence Generation 

Beyond retrospective data analysis, Verana Health is also paving the way for prospective evidence generation, enabling trial sponsors and CROs to generate evidence in real-time as clinical studies unfold. Our integration of prospective data collection within the clinical workflow ensures that data from study participants is continuously collected and minimizes errors resulting from manual data entry, leading to more accurate and up-to-date findings.

Our solution supports a range of study designs, including prospective observational studies, hybrid models, and long-term follow up. This method reduces the time to insights and helps sponsors make data-driven decisions throughout the course of a study. Whether it’s enhancing your real-world evidence strategy or improving clinical development, our prospective evidence generation solution brings greater efficiency and confidence to clinical research.

The Future of Clinical Trials: A Unified, Patient-Centric Approach

At Verana Health, our goal is to advance clinical research through the intelligent use of RWD and AI, fostering an ecosystem where trials are more efficient, inclusive, and impactful. 

Sujay’s recent recognition as a 2024 PharmaVoice 100 List winner underlines our company’s dedication to improving clinical research and ensuring that every patient has the opportunity to benefit from therapeutic innovations brought forth by these studies.

Our team is committed to improving healthcare for underrepresented and diverse populations, and views inclusivity and health equity as vital components to ensuring quality of care and quality of life for patients.

In Sujay’s words, “By utilizing secure and advanced artificial intelligence to unlock real-world data, we can help streamline processes to deliver faster and more reliable results for patients, trial sponsors, and CROs. Our team is committed to improving healthcare for underrepresented and diverse populations, and views inclusivity and health equity as vital components to ensuring quality of care and quality of life for patients.”

The acknowledgment of Sujay’s leadership serves as both validation of our current efforts and a call to continue pushing boundaries. As we look to the future, our focus remains on delivering innovative clinical trial solutions with real-world data and AI that benefit both patients and sponsors alike, leading to a healthier, more equitable future for all.