Oracle is putting its integration knowledge to work on one of the most difficult clinical trial tasks: patient recruitment. And it’s focusing on one of the most difficult environments, though one of the richest in candidates: hospitals, according to Fierce BiotechIT.

The software giant aims to develop interfaces that can find the disparate sources in hospitals that contain patient data relevant to trial subject screening. The idea is an IT overlay that provides access to data captured by the hospital to populate non-hospital databases such as the American Heart Association's or the American College of Surgeons' on infection prevention.

Such sources can be a goldmine of screening data. But they are outside the hospital's IT ecosystem, according to Fierce BiotechIT. The overlay will poll data in a standardized way to help identify trial candidates.

The work is part of an effort by the Partnership to Advance Clinical Electronic Research, which Oracle recently joined.