Top 5 Essentials: What to Know When Choosing an AI Solution for Clinical Trial Recruitment
We’ve all seen the headlines: “AI is revolutionizing drug discovery and development!”
Sounds impressive, right? But what does it actually mean? Let’s break it down.
Specifically, let’s focus on one of the toughest nuts to crack in clinical trials—patient recruitment. How are sites finding and enrolling patients for clinical research?
For many sites, patient recruitment is still a major challenge. Research from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development shows that 11% of trial sites don’t enroll a single patient, 37% miss their enrollment goals, and 80% of trials fail to meet their recruitment targets.
And the kicker? These struggles cost the industry millions —up to $8 million per trial. More than half of clinical trials fail because they can’t enroll enough patients.
Why is it so hard? The problem comes down to three big challenges:
Social ads are expensive and often feel like shots in the dark, especially for complex protocols
EHR searches are painful for coordinators: time consuming, tedious and rarely fruitful
Site feasibility often feels like a game of guess-and-check
So what’s the answer? It’s definitely not throwing more money at ineffective ads or making coordinators comb through EHRs until they scream into the void. That just burns time and budget. What we actually need is to enroll more qualified patients—and fast.
How? The solution has been described as “stupid simple” by the triple founding team at Trially.
The truth is native AI solutions are solving EHR recruitment challenges by doing what humans can’t: matching patients to trials and trials to sites with unprecedented speed and precision.
Sites can finally focus on enrolling the right patients, and stop wasting time chasing the wrong ones.
Ready to dive in? Here are the Top 5 Essentials every site should look for when evaluating an AI technology for clinical trial recruitment.
Protected Data: Because security is non-negotiable
In clinical research, protecting patient data isn’t just a checkbox—it’s an absolute must. The best solutions for sites combine robust governance with advanced security, prioritizing compliance with HIPAA, SOC II, and FDA Part 11 standards.
At Trially, we don’t just meet these standards—we exceed them. Our advanced data infrastructure values the protection of your patient's data as much as you do. That's why we built a client data isolation model which means that every client's data lives in a strictly siloed environment, with isolated cloud storage secured with unique encryption keys.
Trially AI tenants focus on inclusivity, safety, reliability, and privacy. When your data is secure, you can focus on what truly matters—finding the right patients and driving trial success with complete peace of mind.
Plug-and-Play Integrations: Can we all just play nice
Let’s be real—there’s nothing more frustrating than investing in a solution that doesn’t play nice with your current systems. That’s why the right tools should seamlessly integrate with industry-standard electronic health records (EHR) like Epic, Oracle Cerner, NextGen, AthenaHealth, etc., preserving your workflows while making them smarter and faster.
Beyond EHR integrations, sites also need direct linkages to their recruitment CRM to push high quality candidates into your Clinical Trial Management Systems (CTMS). That’s where Trially’s partnership with CRIO comes into play. By combining Trially’s AI matching software with CRIO’s CTMS platforms, sites can quickly identify high quality patients, focus their recruitment strategy and push patients through the CRM (e.g. Salesforce, Hubspot, CRIO, Clinical Conductor, etc). This eliminates manual data entry, so you can spend less time at your desk and more time with high potential candidates.
Protocol Parsing: Talk about a time-saver #GenerativeAI
Tired of writing endless queries? With Trially, those days are over. Simply upload your protocol, and Voilá! Within 5-minutes, our AI breaks it down into discrete inclusion and exclusion criteria cards that can easily be toggled on or off depending on your unique protocol needs. From there, clinical researchers can refine protocols to increase enrollment potential in just a few clicks (because we both know each criterion is not created equal).
Need to amend your protocol? No problem! Simply drag and drop your new protocol into the system and we’ll do the rest. Designed with busy sites in mind, our protocol amendment process is fast, easy, and built to minimize common trial delays.
Smarter Patient Matching: Higher precision, lower screen failures
Imagine unlocking all that rich, unstructured data in electronic health records that used to be out of reach.
With Trially, patient and site matching becomes faster and more precise. Now we can access EHR data in real time – including patient demographics, diagnoses, medications, labs, vitals, imaging, pathology reports, physician notes, allergies, medical history and more. With a single double click, you can see exactly why a patient qualifies—or doesn’t—for your trial, and what additional information is needed to confirm eligibility. From there, you can see who has an upcoming clinic visit within the recruitment window, or just call them directly.
The results? More qualified patients enroll in your trial faster, but don’t just take our word for it. See how a large site network was able to reduce screen failures by 60% and double enrollment with Trially.
Population Analysis: with study success come study opportunities
Site feasibility just got a serious upgrade. The same AI matching technology that is used to match patients to trials is also used to match trials to sites. Plus you can view patient demographics in real time to achieve trial diversity targets.
That’s right. Our Population Analysis solution matches a site’s patient population with upcoming trials and goals, making it easy to discover new trial opportunities and expand your study pipeline. Take the guesswork out of feasibility and position your sites for success before study starts.
Ready to turbocharge your trial enrollment?
By following this checklist, sites can slash over 60% of screen failures and recruit high quality patients, faster. Trially is here to support you every step of the way.
