Real Time Electronic Patient Study Enrollment System in Emergency Room

A successful system to conduct clinical studies should enroll all eligible patients and ensure complete data collection. We developed an online extension to our existing tracking system to improve patient enrollment and data collection. In real-time, our system alerts providers of ongoing studies, clearly conveys eligibility information, efficiently enrolls patients, appends a data form to the patients record and ensures data collection prior to discharge. At any given time, there are multiple different clinical studies occurring in our emergency department. It has been established in literature that collection of data for clinical studies can be an expensive task. In order to maximize patient identification and ensure accurate data collection, it is often necessary to utilize dedicated data collectors. Prior studies suggest that relying on providers to enroll patients captures only 50% of eligible patients and is plagued with data inaccuracy. Our system takes advantage of our web based electronic tracking board to capture patients eligible for a clinical study as well as flagging patients that may be missed. As a component added onto our tracking system, our system asks physicians to determine a patient’s eligibility for a clinical study as they sign up for the patient. The exclusion criterion is displayed for each study and quickly allows the physician to determine eligibility. Once a patient has been flagged as eligible, a data form is appended to their electronic record and must be completed before the patient can be discharged from the tracking system. Written in ASP, our application was designed such that clinical studies could be easily added and removed from the system with minimum programming. In order to ensure that the maximum number of patients are enrolled, our system also searches for key words in the patient’s records to flag eligible patients that were initially missed, at the time of discharge. Additionally, with the ability to extract information from the patients tracking system, our system pre-populates relevant data into the clinical study survey, decreasing the time a physician must spend inputting data. During the period for which our system has been running, we have seen an enrollment rate of 80%. Although we have yet to determine the superior efficiency and economic benefit of our system, our implementation provides another method for health care providers and researchers to gather clinical study information.