Epic Life Sciences Seeks to Expand Clinical Trial Access | Healthcare Innovation

Epic has rolled out its Life Sciences program, seeking to help providers, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device manufacturers recruit research participants, expand clinical trial access to underrepresented communities, and speed up the development of new therapies.

The EHR company said that providers across the world use Epic’s systems to conduct more than 100,000 active research studies with 4.7 million patients.

Epic said it saw opportunities to accelerate the speed of medical advancement by improving how patients, providers, and sponsors interact. Today, many clinical trials use study-specific and disconnected systems that result in duplicative effort and poor communication—inefficiencies that can discourage patients and providers from participating in research.

The initial focus of the Life Sciences program includes:

“The Life Sciences program is designed to create a seamless connection between participant patients, healthcare providers, and research sponsors through the use of a single system,” said Alan Hutchison, vice president at Epic, in a statement. “Unifying clinical research with care delivery and building a direct connection to study sponsors will help accelerate the development of new therapies by making studies more efficient, more accessible, and more effective.”

“The first stage of the Life Sciences program, clinical trial matchmaking, is available today and provider organizations in the Epic community are already signing up,” said Seth Howard, vice president of research and development at Epic, in a statement. “By accurately matching these organizations with clinical trials suited to their patients, researchers will be able to recruit more effectively and help ensure that clinical trials benefit more representative populations,” Howard said. “Ultimately, our shared goal is to help patients access life-changing therapies sooner by reducing friction throughout the clinical trial lifecycle.”

Other efforts are also under way to bridge clinical care and clinical research. In 2020 HL7 announced the launch of a FHIR accelerator, Project Vulcan, which seeks to use the HL7 standard to help healthcare researchers more effectively acquire, exchange and use data in translational and clinical research.