Matching Patients to Accelerate Clinical Trials (MPACT): Enabling Technology for Oncology Clinical Trial Workflow.

Clinical trial enrollment is impeded by the significant time burden placed on research coordinators screening eligible patients. With 50,000 new cancer cases every year, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has made increased access for Veterans to high-quality clinical trials a priority. To aid in this effort, we worked with research coordinators to build the MPACT (Matching Patients to Accelerate Clinical Trials) platform with a goal of improving efficiency in the screening process. MPACT supports both a trial prescreening workflow and a screening workflow, employing Natural Language Processing and Data Science methods to produce reliable phenotypes of trial eligibility criteria. MPACT also has a functionality to track a patient's eligibility status over time. Qualitative feedback has been promising with users reporting a reduction in time spent on identifying eligible patients.

ProjectFlow: a configurable workflow management application for point of care research.

OBJECTIVE: To best meet our point-of-care research (POC-R) needs, we developed ProjectFlow, a configurable, clinical research workflow management application. In this article, we describe ProjectFlow and how it is used to manage study processes for the Diuretic Comparison Project (DCP) and the Research Precision Oncology Program (RePOP). MATERIALS AND METHODS: The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is the largest integrated health care system in the United States. ProjectFlow is a flexible web-based workflow management tool specifically created to facilitate conduct of our clinical research initiatives within the VHA. The application was developed using the Grails web framework and allows researchers to create custom workflows using Business Process Model and Notation. RESULTS: As of January 2021, ProjectFlow has facilitated management of study recruitment, enrollment, randomization, and drug orders for over 10 000 patients for the DCP clinical trial. It has also helped us evaluate over 3800 patients for recruitment and enroll over 370 of them into RePOP for use in data sharing partnerships and predictive analytics aimed at optimizing cancer treatment in the VHA. DISCUSSION: The POC-R study design embeds research processes within day-to-day clinical care and leverages longitudinal electronic health record (EHR) data for study recruitment, monitoring, and outcome reporting. Software that allows flexibility in study workflow creation and integrates with enterprise EHR systems is critical to the success of POC-R. CONCLUSIONS: We developed a flexible web-based informatics solution called ProjectFlow that supports custom research workflow configuration and has ability to integrate data from existing VHA EHR systems.

An application to support COVID-19 occupational health and patient tracking at a Veterans Affairs medical center.

OBJECTIVE: Reducing risk of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection among healthcare personnel requires a robust occupational health response involving multiple disciplines. We describe a flexible informatics solution to enable such coordination, and we make it available as open-source software. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We developed a stand-alone application that integrates data from several sources, including electronic health record data and data captured outside the electronic health record. RESULTS: The application facilitates workflows from different hospital departments, including Occupational Health and Infection Control, and has been used extensively. As of June 2020, 4629 employees and 7768 patients and have been added for tracking by the application, and the application has been accessed over 46 000 times. DISCUSSION: Data captured by the application provides both a historical and real-time view into the operational impact of COVID-19 within the hospital, enabling aggregate and patient-level reporting to support identification of new cases, contact tracing, outbreak investigations, and employee workforce management. CONCLUSIONS: We have developed an open-source application that facilitates communication and workflow across multiple disciplines to manage hospital employees impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.