Identifying suitable patients for clinical trials is a time-consuming and resource-intensive task for many trial centres. To better support trial centres in meeting this challenge, Work Package 4 ‘Prescreening & Feasibility’ within the NUM Study Network is developing a shared recruitment infrastructure. The work package is led by experts in medical informatics from the Institute for Medical Informatics and Biometrics in Dresden and the Data Integration Centre in Gießen, who are pooling their expertise to develop a cross-site solution. The aim is to support study teams in identifying potentially suitable study participants and to make recruitment processes more efficient, transparent and traceable. The recruitment support software developed is intended to help reduce the manual effort involved in searching for participants, achieve trial objectives more quickly and enable the consistent and reproducible application of recruitment criteria, whilst medical assessment and decision-making remain entirely the responsibility of the treating teams.
As part of a multi-day hackathon at Justus Liebig University Giessen, the AP4 team worked on further developing this infrastructure. The aim was to provide specialist networks and trial centres with even better support for cross-site recruitment in future and to make processes for multicentre trials more efficient.
A key focus of the meeting was the further development of the system architecture towards a modular platform with open interfaces. This will enable individual components to be flexibly expanded or adapted to local requirements in future. For the NUM Study Network community, this lays the foundation for integrating new specialist networks, studies and sites more easily, whilst benefiting from shared technical solutions.
In addition, concepts for connecting to the Data Integration Centres were further developed. This integration is an important step towards making the recruitment infrastructure available at NUM sites in the long term and operating it sustainably.
The prototypes developed during the hackathon already demonstrate what a scalable and future-proof recruitment platform for the NUM Study Network could look like. In this way, AP4 ‘Prescreening & Feasibility’ makes an important contribution to strengthening clinical research and to the conduct of clinical and clinical-epidemiological studies within the NUM.
The concepts developed during the hackathon were subsequently consolidated, prioritised and assessed for feasibility in a strategy workshop. On this basis, the team defined the next development steps to drive forward the expansion of the recruitment infrastructure within the NUM Study Network in a targeted manner.