Kurt Mussina is the CEO of Paradigm Clinical Research. Their model involves dedicated sites chosen for access to their desired patient and physician populations to participate in clinical trials. Access to historically underrepresented populations for both patients and healthy volunteers is a key requirement.
One can imagine it takes a lot of effort to figure that out from demographic data etc.
Kurt shared with me their approach using ChatGPT with some plugins not only for determining the best places to lease space, but also for qualifying and scheduling potential participants and determining which contracts to pursue based on their historical successes and current strategy.
3 Applications of ChatGPT or AI:
Where to lease and build out clinical trial sites
Kurt and his head of clinical operations are based in Boise Idaho. The first requirement was to be able to visit sites without spending too much time traveling. He searched the website of the Boise airport for nonstop destinations that were reachable in a half day or less. That narrows things down to the western half of the US. They queried ChatGPT to identify which of those have, within a two-hour drive, populations with a significant proportion of people historically underrepresented in clinical research.
For example, Chico California is one of those cities. Paradigm already has sites in Sacramento and Redding, which allows them to use the staff they already have on the ground and existing relationships to get a good start.
Using AI chatbots to qualify patients and volunteers for studies
Paradigm runs ads on Facebook to recruit potential participants. When a person visits the website looking for trials to participate in, rather than delivering a long list to browse, a chatbot will ask them questions about their age, background etc, to preview relevant trials and pre-qualify the person. It can then help schedule a phone appointment for further information and qualification.
Contract assessment and budgeting
There are thousands of trials going on at any one time. Which ones does Paradigm want to bid on based on their patient populations, investigators, and desired indications?
Paradigm uses Salesforce to manage their sales pipeline. A sponsor or CRO may send out a feasibility questionnaire. This clip from the interview explains how an AI, based on their previous successes, helps decide which studies they’d like to bid on as well as providing a range of cost estimates and contract terms.
I asked Kurt, how they decided to take this approach to all of these important steps. It turns out the husband of a board member is pretty AI-savvy. Would you be as comfortable trying something similar if you didn’t know anyone with that kind of AI expertise?
In a couple of years, no one will think twice about this kind of approach. As I see it right now, the real barrier is our own imagination in terms of what problems do we need to solve and how to ask the right questions. Many of the current examples we see are using AI to generate content - images or drafts of written content, or some data analysis. It might be helpful to think of ChatGPT and its “colleagues” as individuals you hire to do a specific job.
In this example, it would be like, “Hey Joe, can you compile a report on cities we can get to easily that have historically underrepresented populations? When you are done with that, set up a web page to qualify and inform people interested in participating in a clinical trial. Oh, and then, take a look through our historical data and let me know which of our leads in Salesforce are the most promising.”
Those are the jobs to be done. I should say that Kurt was very clear that they worked with people outside the company to get these tasks done. In the end, one can see how it improves efficiency at every step.
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Using ChatGPT to Optimize Your Market Geographically