VigiLanz Helps Sharp HealthCare Identify Patients for Clinical Trials

At Sharp HealthCare, finding qualified patients for clinical trials used to be a very time-consuming process.

“At baseline, we would screen for patients for our studies by looking at the floors we would expect them to be on in the hospital, and just open up every chart,” says Christine Parra, RN, BSN. “VigiLanz came in and cut that time down significantly.”

In fact, screening time for the team is down 75%.

Watch the video below to hear how the Sharp Center for Research is using VigiLanz Clinical Trial Solution to speed up the screening process and meet targeted enrollment windows, and read more about the team’s experience with the game-changing software.

Transcript:

We do a lot in research as advanced clinical trial specialists. We collaborate with our physicians, doctor’s offices, hospital units, nursing staff, and study sponsors to start up research studies and find the right fit for our primary investigators, and make sure that we have great follow-up care for the patients that choose to enroll in our studies.

At baseline, we would screen for patients for our studies by looking at the floors we would expect them to be on in the hospital, and just open up every chart, look for them, and it was a very time-consuming process.

VigiLanz came in and cut that time down significantly.

VigiLanz was able to distill down the inclusion and exclusion criteria to be able to comb the chart, and so they then send us emails with the 12 or 13 criteria, and say, “This patient qualifies,” and then those that don’t qualify, we don’t even get.

Our screening time is probably down 75 percent.

Over that time, VigiLanz has sent us more than 500 patients, and now that screening process takes about two and a half minutes as opposed to probably six or seven minutes per patient per chart.

A lot of our studies involve emergent patients with emergent procedures and very small enrollment windows, so we can only consent them within a certain time period before their procedure happens. So getting those very precise notifications on the spot helps us to identify patients in real time and be able to enroll them. And our physician’s principal investigator is really happy. He’ll call and say, “I’ve got this patient,” and I said, “I’m already on my way over. We got the alert.”

The VigiLanz team has been amazing. They are so responsive, proactive, and helpful with any questions that we might have.

We do meet with the VigiLanz team regularly, every other week, to discuss our progress with our studies, any issues we might have with the program which have been few, and in response they are able to correct those issues, tweak the criteria to include the patients more effectively, and ensure that we’re getting the best experience out of the program which we absolutely are.

VigiLanz has been a wonderful addition to our team, and they are literally a part of our team.