Clinerion announced a new service which gives patient populations access to precision medicine treatments based on its Patient Recruitment System’s Patient Finder tool.

Clinerion announces a new service and use case for its Patient Recruitment System (PRS). The PRS Patient Finder tool can now be used to give patients requiring personalized, precision, or orphan treatments access to new medicines earlier, and give physicians additional options in treating them.

With the new service, patients in “hard-to-reach” populations, such as patients with rare diseases and patients requiring personalized treatments, can be matched with new, targeted treatments. As patients with rare diseases are de facto very rare, connecting the patient to an innovative treatment is often very inefficient without a technological solution in place. It becomes even more challenging if not all patients suffering from a particular rare disease will benefit from a treatment, but only a specific sub-population. Such patients need to be identified using genetic testing and there is currently no organized process to find all the patients eligible for a specific drug.

Even larger difficulties are experienced when the targeted patient population is characterized by a number of factors, wherein no single factor is rare by itself. Modern precision medicine increasingly treats smaller patient populations by specifying age, lab data results, diagnosis and medication history, which results in targeting populations of 100 patients per million and less.

The PRS Patient Finder tool is able to query hospital information systems across Clinerion’s connected hospitals in real-time, using complex combinations of criteria based on demographics, diagnoses, medication, laboratory values, radiology and other procedures. The tool provides automated alerts for hospital staff to identify patients entering hospital systems in time and enroll them for clinical research trials before traditional treatment is initiated. Real-time alerts are critical for treatment of time-sensitive clinical conditions, such as pain or infectious diseases.

With the PRS Patient Finder tool’s new service, patients with rare conditions can benefit from new treatments on the market and they can access these treatments earlier.

The approach involves two steps: first running de-identified queries across Clinerion’s network of participating hospitals, identifying hospitals and physicians who provide care for potentially eligible patients. Second, activating Patient Finder at the hospital for the physician to identify those patients who correspond to the profile defined for the innovative drug treatment. The process of using Patient Finder can include steps of data gathering and performing tests which were not previously done, serving as a management tool to ensure all eligible patients are identified.

“Industry feedback shows a need for matching drugs with patients,” says Tigran Arzumanov, Clinerion’s Head of Sales, “this new approach allows the identification of patients eligible for targeted, specialized treatment, while maintaining patient and physician privacy.”

Patient data security is built in to Clinerion’s PRS. Within PRS, patient privacy is maintained and compliant with international standards such as HIPAA. PRS runs behind the firewalls inside the IT infrastructure of a hospital. Patient data is de-identified (pseudonymized) while on hospital-controlled infrastructure, using encryption keys exclusively under hospital control. Patient data is never removed from the hospital premises; the physician holds the keys for re-identification and remains the decision maker on patient treatment.