HIMSSCast: Epic leaders on data-driven clinical trial innovation

Better ways to access, aggregate and analyze data are enabling design of more representative clinical trials – and delivery of better care in general, say the company's VP of clinical informatics and its VP of business intelligence and analytics.

By Mike Miliard

February 17, 2023

10:50 AM

Photo: Tetra Images/Getty Images

The challenges of designing effective clinical trials, finding the right people to participate in them and building trial cohorts that are representative of the population at large, have been well-documented.

With its recent Life Sciences initiative, Epic has set its sights on data-driven insights to improve the development of new therapeutics and interventions. That includes improving all parts of the clinical trial process – from how physicians educate their patients about potential cohorts, matching and connecting patients with promising research and helping make sure those studies are optimally beneficial for as many people as possible. Epic is already helping its provider customers engage with more than 100,000 active research studies covering some 4.7 million patients.

We spoke recently with Dr. Jackie Gerhart, VP of clinical informatics at Epic, and Phil Lindemann, the company's VP of business intelligence and analytics, about the Life Sciences project. They also spoke about an array of other innovations made possible by the vast datasets of Epic's Cosmos platform, enabling care improvements in everything from behavioral health to perinatal care.

They also discuss how new AI-enabled interfaces will make analytical insights easier for clinicians to access within their normal workflows.

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Talking points:

Epic's Life Sciences project – what it is, why it was created and what it hopes to accomplish.
The challenges of helping providers find optimal clinical trial participants, and build more representative cohorts?
How Epic's customers are making use of their data to help with trial recruitment, and how it can be improved.
How other technologies, such as Epic's Cosmos platform, are helping enable care improvements and better patient outcomes.
AI-powered advances in voice and NLP, and how they can help with decision support and clinical workflows.
How do you see the data ecosystem will continue evolving across healthcare, including areas such as disease surveillance and public health?