What is Provider Activation?

What is Provider Activation?

What is Provider Activation?

Why healthcare providers are the key to accelerating drug development

Why healthcare providers are the key to accelerating drug development

Why healthcare providers are the key to accelerating drug development

Clinical trial operations need a breakthrough

Today, tens of thousands of drugs are at various stages of development within universities, small biotech labs, and large pharmaceutical companies. In the future, one of these drugs might alleviate the suffering of someone you love.

Standing between those drugs and the patients who urgently need them is one of the most costly, complex, and failure-prone business and scientific processes on the planet: clinical trials, where the drug is administered to humans for the first time. These trials are designed to answer the only question that really matters, "does this drug help this person?"

For most trials, the primary source of delay, risk, and cost comes from patient recruitment. The challenge is easy to understand. Most people most of the time don't want to take an experimental drug. Around 80% of trials don't meet their recruitment timelines, which can easily incur months of delay, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in unplanned cost, and sometimes complete trial failure.

There are two ways a person can be introduced to a trial. There's direct recruitment, i.e. advertisements directly to patients, or provider-based recruitment, which is when a doctor suggests a trial as a care option. Direct recruitment had its breakthrough moment with Facebook Ads, which allowed sponsors, CROs, and sites to reach more candidates than ever before. But that breakthrough has been fully digested by the market and remains insufficient to meet the growing demand for trial participants.

Provider-based recruitment is on the cusp of its breakthrough moment. Over 70% of providers would like to inform their patients of relevant trials, but fewer than 5% actually do. The gap is partially explained by the burden that a doctor must take on to provide this service to their patients. Doctors are notoriously overworked, with most doctors able to afford just a few vital minutes with each patient.

The problem is Provider Activation

For a provider to refer a patient to a clinical trial, they must first navigate substantial legal and business complexity to build relationships with nearby trial sites. Then on a daily or weekly basis, the provider must remember which trials are recruiting at those sites, and evaluate whether the patient in front of them satisfies the increasingly complex eligibility criteria. For most providers, the hours simply do not exist in the day to be able to do this, regardless of their motivation for doing the work.

Provider Activation is a newly solvable problem. There are specific regulatory and technological changes that make this more addressable than it was even 2 years ago. First, the US government has stepped up requirements on health IT system interoperability via the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC), making it easier than ever to get data in and out of health IT systems. Second, the current generation of AI tools (specifically Large Language Models) can convert unstructured clinicians' notes into usable data.

The interface between providers and trial sites, or between healthcare and research in general, is now ripe for automation and machine-assisted work in several key workflows. Among these are feasibility, EMR scrubbing, data transfer, pre-screening, scheduling, marketing, consenting, and data management.

We can increase the share of referring physicians from <5% to 10%. In a world where 72% of physicians want to refer, this goal doesn't seem wildly ambitious. It also seems possible to increase the median referral rate from 0.2% of annual patient flow to 0.4% of annual patient flow: a whopping 10 patients per year. This would constitute the outright destruction of the trial recruitment bottleneck, and would dramatically shift the cost and risk calculus of bringing a drug to market. A well-placed lever can move a mountain, and that's the opportunity we see here.

What it's all worth in the end

Technology is speeding up nearly every facet of drug development except clinical trials. More papers are published, more novel molecules are designed, and more manufacturing techniques are perfected every day. But the assembly line cannot produce goods faster than its slowest component. It cannot produce goods at a lower cost than the most expensive sub-process. We cannot produce a step-change improvement to drug development writ large without a step-change improvement to clinical trials, and we believe Provider Activation is the largest opportunity for this. At the end of the day, this means that when (not if, but when) our loved ones urgently need a treatment, they will have more numerous and higher quality options available to them.


Are you onboard?


Clinical trial operations need a breakthrough

Today, tens of thousands of drugs are at various stages of development within universities, small biotech labs, and large pharmaceutical companies. In the future, one of these drugs might alleviate the suffering of someone you love.

Standing between those drugs and the patients who urgently need them is one of the most costly, complex, and failure-prone business and scientific processes on the planet: clinical trials, where the drug is administered to humans for the first time. These trials are designed to answer the only question that really matters, "does this drug help this person?"

For most trials, the primary source of delay, risk, and cost comes from patient recruitment. The challenge is easy to understand. Most people most of the time don't want to take an experimental drug. Around 80% of trials don't meet their recruitment timelines, which can easily incur months of delay, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in unplanned cost, and sometimes complete trial failure.

There are two ways a person can be introduced to a trial. There's direct recruitment, i.e. advertisements directly to patients, or provider-based recruitment, which is when a doctor suggests a trial as a care option. Direct recruitment had its breakthrough moment with Facebook Ads, which allowed sponsors, CROs, and sites to reach more candidates than ever before. But that breakthrough has been fully digested by the market and remains insufficient to meet the growing demand for trial participants.

Provider-based recruitment is on the cusp of its breakthrough moment. Over 70% of providers would like to inform their patients of relevant trials, but fewer than 5% actually do. The gap is partially explained by the burden that a doctor must take on to provide this service to their patients. Doctors are notoriously overworked, with most doctors able to afford just a few vital minutes with each patient.

The problem is Provider Activation

For a provider to refer a patient to a clinical trial, they must first navigate substantial legal and business complexity to build relationships with nearby trial sites. Then on a daily or weekly basis, the provider must remember which trials are recruiting at those sites, and evaluate whether the patient in front of them satisfies the increasingly complex eligibility criteria. For most providers, the hours simply do not exist in the day to be able to do this, regardless of their motivation for doing the work.

Provider Activation is a newly solvable problem. There are specific regulatory and technological changes that make this more addressable than it was even 2 years ago. First, the US government has stepped up requirements on health IT system interoperability via the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC), making it easier than ever to get data in and out of health IT systems. Second, the current generation of AI tools (specifically Large Language Models) can convert unstructured clinicians' notes into usable data.

The interface between providers and trial sites, or between healthcare and research in general, is now ripe for automation and machine-assisted work in several key workflows. Among these are feasibility, EMR scrubbing, data transfer, pre-screening, scheduling, marketing, consenting, and data management.

We can increase the share of referring physicians from <5% to 10%. In a world where 72% of physicians want to refer, this goal doesn't seem wildly ambitious. It also seems possible to increase the median referral rate from 0.2% of annual patient flow to 0.4% of annual patient flow: a whopping 10 patients per year. This would constitute the outright destruction of the trial recruitment bottleneck, and would dramatically shift the cost and risk calculus of bringing a drug to market. A well-placed lever can move a mountain, and that's the opportunity we see here.

What it's all worth in the end

Technology is speeding up nearly every facet of drug development except clinical trials. More papers are published, more novel molecules are designed, and more manufacturing techniques are perfected every day. But the assembly line cannot produce goods faster than its slowest component. It cannot produce goods at a lower cost than the most expensive sub-process. We cannot produce a step-change improvement to drug development writ large without a step-change improvement to clinical trials, and we believe Provider Activation is the largest opportunity for this. At the end of the day, this means that when (not if, but when) our loved ones urgently need a treatment, they will have more numerous and higher quality options available to them.


Are you onboard?


Clinical trial operations need a breakthrough

Today, tens of thousands of drugs are at various stages of development within universities, small biotech labs, and large pharmaceutical companies. In the future, one of these drugs might alleviate the suffering of someone you love.

Standing between those drugs and the patients who urgently need them is one of the most costly, complex, and failure-prone business and scientific processes on the planet: clinical trials, where the drug is administered to humans for the first time. These trials are designed to answer the only question that really matters, "does this drug help this person?"

For most trials, the primary source of delay, risk, and cost comes from patient recruitment. The challenge is easy to understand. Most people most of the time don't want to take an experimental drug. Around 80% of trials don't meet their recruitment timelines, which can easily incur months of delay, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in unplanned cost, and sometimes complete trial failure.

There are two ways a person can be introduced to a trial. There's direct recruitment, i.e. advertisements directly to patients, or provider-based recruitment, which is when a doctor suggests a trial as a care option. Direct recruitment had its breakthrough moment with Facebook Ads, which allowed sponsors, CROs, and sites to reach more candidates than ever before. But that breakthrough has been fully digested by the market and remains insufficient to meet the growing demand for trial participants.

Provider-based recruitment is on the cusp of its breakthrough moment. Over 70% of providers would like to inform their patients of relevant trials, but fewer than 5% actually do. The gap is partially explained by the burden that a doctor must take on to provide this service to their patients. Doctors are notoriously overworked, with most doctors able to afford just a few vital minutes with each patient.

The problem is Provider Activation

For a provider to refer a patient to a clinical trial, they must first navigate substantial legal and business complexity to build relationships with nearby trial sites. Then on a daily or weekly basis, the provider must remember which trials are recruiting at those sites, and evaluate whether the patient in front of them satisfies the increasingly complex eligibility criteria. For most providers, the hours simply do not exist in the day to be able to do this, regardless of their motivation for doing the work.

Provider Activation is a newly solvable problem. There are specific regulatory and technological changes that make this more addressable than it was even 2 years ago. First, the US government has stepped up requirements on health IT system interoperability via the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC), making it easier than ever to get data in and out of health IT systems. Second, the current generation of AI tools (specifically Large Language Models) can convert unstructured clinicians' notes into usable data.

The interface between providers and trial sites, or between healthcare and research in general, is now ripe for automation and machine-assisted work in several key workflows. Among these are feasibility, EMR scrubbing, data transfer, pre-screening, scheduling, marketing, consenting, and data management.

We can increase the share of referring physicians from <5% to 10%. In a world where 72% of physicians want to refer, this goal doesn't seem wildly ambitious. It also seems possible to increase the median referral rate from 0.2% of annual patient flow to 0.4% of annual patient flow: a whopping 10 patients per year. This would constitute the outright destruction of the trial recruitment bottleneck, and would dramatically shift the cost and risk calculus of bringing a drug to market. A well-placed lever can move a mountain, and that's the opportunity we see here.

What it's all worth in the end

Technology is speeding up nearly every facet of drug development except clinical trials. More papers are published, more novel molecules are designed, and more manufacturing techniques are perfected every day. But the assembly line cannot produce goods faster than its slowest component. It cannot produce goods at a lower cost than the most expensive sub-process. We cannot produce a step-change improvement to drug development writ large without a step-change improvement to clinical trials, and we believe Provider Activation is the largest opportunity for this. At the end of the day, this means that when (not if, but when) our loved ones urgently need a treatment, they will have more numerous and higher quality options available to them.


Are you onboard?