Nat Turner: Data Can Disrupt Clinical Research and Improve Patient Care

Nat Turner, co-founder and CEO of Flatiron Health, explains how data can be used for finding potential patients to be included in clinical trials.

Transcript (slightly modified)

How is data being used in clinical research to improve patient care?

A bunch of ways. The easiest to understand, or the simplest, is finding patients. So, you might have 800 patients coming in across your clinical in a day, you need to figure out which of those—most won’t be eligible—are potentially eligible for a clinical trial. Data is really the best way to do that since you can do it even before the patient walks in the door. That’s what we call patient finding.

The next is feasibility. So, if you’re a site and maybe you attract a certain type of patient population, maybe a doctor of yours specializes—whatever it might be—showing off your patient population to sponsors that are running trials is a very data-driven opportunity that could help you attract better studies. Also, once the study is live there’s a lot of data that could be used. Today, for example, you’re trying to compare a treatment to the real world, the standard of care, perhaps you could use the electronic health record data to model that standard of care, so you don’t have patients that could go on placebo, you could just model the standard of care. That’s a really exciting way data could disrupt clinical research.