Clinerion, a Swiss-based software and services company, has launched its Patient Recruitment System (PRS). Clinerion’s PRS radically boosts recruitment for clinical trials, identifying 10 to 30 times more suitable candidates than those found through a classical manual screening approach, and in a matter of minutes rather than the weeks or months typically needed.

Ulf Claesson, CEO of Clinerion, said, “Patient recruitment typically accounts for around 30% of the cost and time for clinical trials, yet more than 75% of studies fail to recruit their patients on time, costing the industry between $500,000 and $5 million in potential lost sales per day.”

Claesson said, “Results from the last 18 months shows our PRS can significantly speed up the recruitment process, offering a major opportunity for efficiency improvements and savings for the global pharmaceutical industry.”

Using semantic and ontology methods, Clinerion’s automated PRS is designed to be used in countries with medical informatics infrastructures, where trials represent a major source of innovation and income for public and private hospitals, as well as healthcare systems.

The advantage of Clinerion’s system lies in its ability to identify suitable clinical study candidates for a given protocol through automated, simultaneous and real-time screening of multiple electronic health records. This system thus enables pharmaceutical companies to conduct feasibility analyses, as well as to quickly identify patients for study recruitment.

The system includes coded information for diagnoses, treatments and medicines, as well as for data such as lab values and information derived from sources such as free-text, including narratives and reports. Eligibility criteria can be mapped between standard medical and hospital-specific terminologies, while free-text is screened with the support of a natural language-processing function.

Clinerion’s PRS is available through an easy-to-use web-based application that can be employed for all disease indications and interventional trials in virtually all hospital systems, as well as in acute and outpatient settings.