Federated electronic health records research technology to support clinical trial protocol optimization: Evidence from EHR4CR and the InSite platform

Objective: To determine if inclusion/exclusion (I/E) criteria of clinical trial protocols can be represented as structured queries and executed using a secure federated research platform (InSite) on hospital electronic health records (EHR) systems, to estimate the number of potentially eligible patients.

Methods: Twenty-three clinical trial protocols completed during 2011-2017 across diverse disease areas were analyzed to construct queries that were executed with InSite using EHR records from 24 European hospitals containing records of >14 million patients. The number of patients matching I/E criteria of each protocol was estimated.

Results: All protocols could be formalized to some extent into a medical coding system (e.g. ICD-10CM, ATC, LOINC, SNOMED) and mapped to local hospital coding systems. The median number of I/E criteria of protocols tested was 29 (range: 14-47). A median of 55% (range 38-89%) of I/E criteria in each protocol could be transformed into a computable format. The median number of eligible patients identified was 26 per hospital site (range: 1-134).

Conclusion: Clinical trial I/E eligibility criteria can be structured computationally and executed as queries on EHR systems to estimate the patient recruitment pool at each site. The results further suggest that an increase in structured coded information in EHRs would increase the number of I/E criteria that could be evaluated. Additional work is needed on broader deployment of federated platforms such as InSite.