Partnership embeds primary care data directly into clinical trials

A partnership between NorthWest eHealth (NWEH) and OneAdvanced is aiming to transform clinical trials by directly integrating primary care data.

Rather than relying solely on traditional single-site study centres, NWEH works with GP networks and delivery partners nationwide to embed research within routine care settings.

This reduces the need for patients to attend a hospital-based trial site, so that trials can take place through GP surgeries, mobile units, community settings, wearables or remote monitoring.

Following patient consent, data from OneAdvanced’s Docman primary care document workflow system is connected with NWEH’s ConneXon trial delivery platform, enabling trial teams to access relevant clinical correspondence in near real-time.

Docman is used widely in UK primary care to manage documents moving from secondary care into GP practices, such as referrals, outpatient letters and discharge summaries.

Jo Verity, head of clinical operations at NWEH, told Digital Health News that working with OneAdvanced “opens so many doors for us to deliver research in different models”.

“Through this collaboration, we have established the capability to utilise the solution’s clinical correspondence data within our decentralised trial model.

“This supports more informed clinical decision-making, improves operational efficiency for both NWEH and participating GP practices, and strengthens safety oversight throughout the trial lifecycle,” she said.

The ConneXon platform can also bring in data from electronic health records and other sources such as wearables, depending on the requirements of a given study.

Usually in a clinical trial, GP data would have to be manually extracted, which leads to delays in seeing hospital events, discharge information, adverse events, and ongoing clinical activity.

Verity said that the new model supports a shift away from traditional hospital-centric research and provides “the opportunity to survey patient safety whilst they’re on a study”.

“We can view, at a moment’s notice, a patient who’s been discharged and look at real-time adverse events, which we weren’t able to do in the research models of old.

“This gives us the opportunity to deliver to more of the underserved groups of patients which probably ordinarily wouldn’t come forward to take part in research,” she said.

NWEH’s Farsite platform uses pseudonymised GP data to identify eligible patients for clinical trials, who are then contacted by their practice to obtain consent for trial participation and data use.

“It’s their own GPs who invite these patients to their studies so they can feel confident that it’s their primary caregiver reaching out to them,” Verity said.

Nicole Kayode, VP of product – health and care at OneAdvanced, told Digital Health News: “This aligns really nicely with the 10 year plan in terms of reducing that time to research and driving productivity and efficiency gains.

“You’re not having to send people out to manually extract this information and introducing a time delay. You can drive that efficiency in-house.”

She added that the partnership aims to attract more research to the UK to benefit patients.

“Anything we can do to support driving that is something we’re really passionate about,” Kayode said.

NWEH currently has its first major clinical trial underway incorporating OneAdvanced’s technology.