Q: What is Clinerion’s coverage? How many patients, how many countries, over how long?
A: We are in many countries in Europe, Asia, North America and South America, with a multitude of countries in the pipeline. Our current coverage is now visible on our homepage. [Updated November 28, 2018.]
The timeframe encompassed by our data differs depending on the availability of electronic health records and on their availability in the hospital’s current hospital information system. In general, our data goes back five years.
Q: How many hospitals and patients are included in the cloud?
A: We don’t actually include hospitals or patients in the cloud. We use the hospital infrastructure and our cloud is there to run queries, manage queries, create audit trails, etc.
Q: How do you handle countries where there are regulations preventing personal data from being exported overseas (including being hosted by overseas servers)?
A: The data we access is not stored in a centralized location, nor is it in the cloud. Patient data remains hosted locally at each of the hospitals that we work with.
Q: What can you do for a specific condition such as breast cancer?
A: We can identify eligible patients with due regard to detailed inclusion/exclusion constraints, e.g. diagnosis, medication, medical procedures, lab tests and demographics. Our system is able to incorporate time-sensitivity in the queries. All of these apply to any condition, and the results are in real-time.
Oncology patients, specifically, can be screened and filtered by attributes as cancer stage group, cancer T stage, cancer N stage, cancer M stage, etc.
Q: This seems to be geared at hospitals. How would this apply to local physician practices?
A: The system is not limited to hospitals. It also can be used for screening and analyzing patient data of an unlimited number of physician practices. We can include any health providing institution if it has a good level of EHR quality. In practice, we are more focused on hospitals as they can also function as eventual trial sites. It is also more efficient to connect hospitals with their high number of patients than physician practices which have lower numbers of patients. In certain countries that we cover, we are connected to both primary and secondary care facilities.
Q: What methods are available to connect the data from the hospital information system?
A: Clinerion uses an advanced, proprietary data extraction technology, which offers a number of advantages over existing technologies, including a detailed data model developed specifically for clinical research, ease of use and administration, built-in automatic data transfer to the Clinerion server, support from Clinerion, and regular updates to keep the model in line with future needs. In addition, the Clinerion Patient Network Explorer can extract patient records from any data warehouse through other protocols, including i2b2, OMOP, FHIR/HL7, etc., and proprietary APIs.
Q: What is the data lag?
A: The data refresh rate that we use routinely is 24 hours. However, we can work with a frequency of down to one minute. This is activated on a case-by-case basis, for instance when a clinical trial is run in an acute setting.
Q: Can your partner hospitals re-identify patient records with a time shift?
A: Yes.
Q: Are you working with any sponsors, or CROs, yet?
A: As of September 2017, Clinerion has performed more than 20 recruitment studies and more than 70 feasibility studies for the top 10 pharmaceutical companies and largest CROs.
