Newswise — CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Advocate Health is reinforcing its role as a national leader in oncology care and artificial intelligence innovations by partnering with Lind to help connect more cancer patients to potentially life-saving clinical trials.
Lind is an AI platform designed for health systems to improve how patients are identified and matched to cancer clinical trials. The partnership reflects Advocate Health’s long-term commitment to responsibly advancing AI as a critical part of the future of healthcare.
Currently, clinical trial matching for cancer patients is one of the biggest barriers to accelerating cancer research. The manual screening processes are laborious, inconsistent across sites of care and difficult to scale. This results in only 5% of eligible patients across the nation participating in clinical trials.
Lind simplifies the process.
The platform will be embedded into an electronic health record and automatically screens patients for clinical trials. Lind works alongside clinicians, not instead of, and allows clinician oversight before enrolling a patient into a trial. The human-plus-AI model supports better workflows, patient experiences and efficiencies.
“There are far too many cancer patients who could benefit from clinical trials as a care option but are never identified because the process is too complex,” said Ruben Mesa, MD, president of Advocate Health’s Cancer National Service Line. “By partnering with Lind, Advocate Health will ensure more patients have access to potentially life-changing treatments without replacing the critical role our clinicians have.”
A recent retrospective study using real-world data reviewing more than 1,700 individual eligibility criteria, found Lind achieved more than 94% agreement with clinical reviewers and demonstrated strong trial level performance across multiple matching thresholds.
The study took place at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist’s NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, which is part of Advocate Health. It will publish Monday in JCO Oncology Practice.
Jai Patel, PharmD, associate vice president of translational research at Advocate Health and associate professor of cancer biology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, led the study. He is presenting the findings during the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting.
“Our findings show Lind can meaningfully support research teams by quickly and consistently identifying patients who may be eligible for clinical trials as a care option,” Patel said. “By combining AI-enabled screening with required clinician review, this will ultimately help connect more patients to trials.”
The study shows AI enabled trial screening can reduce the time required to assess eligibility from up to an hour per patient to minutes, while still requiring clinical human review for final decisions. This human plus AI approach has the potential to nearly double screening capacity, allowing research teams to evaluate more patients, improve access to trials and accelerate cancer research without compromising clinical judgment.
With Wake Forest University School of Medicine as its academic core, Advocate Health has launched the first prospective trial to test if Lind can identify more patients who are eligible for trials, increase the number of patients being screened for trials and increase the number of successful enrollments into clinical trials.
In 2025, Advocate Health screened almost 1 million patients for cancer at more than 130 cancer clinics across Wisconsin, Illinois, North Carolina and Georgia – impacting more than 14,000 cancer patients through clinical trial accruals. Currently, Advocate Health is running more than 1,500 cancer clinical trials at more than 50 sites of care. Lind, and its AI-platform, is the next iteration of this work.
“We are proud to partner with healthcare systems like Advocate Health who are setting the standard for how AI should be responsibly integrated into care,” Oggie Nikolic, CEO of Lind, said. “Our goal is to partner directly with clinicians, embed Lind into their workflows and help improve the outcomes for cancer patients.”
The prospective study is expected to take several months.
The partnership with Lind is just one of the many ways Advocate Health is advancing cancer care and expanding access to clinical trials – for all. By taking innovative technologies and pairing them with our expert care teams, we are defining the future of cancer care.
What Others are Saying
Rasu Shrestha, MD, Chief Innovation Officer, Advocate Health: “This partnership reflects Advocate Health’s commitment to advancing innovation in a way that is responsible, ethical and grounded in real clinical needs. Our partnership with Lind demonstrates how we leverage our carefully curated innovation partnership ecosystem and work with innovative companies to co-develop and co-create solutions that can be scaled across the ‘living-lab’ of Advocate Health.”
Andy Crowder, Chief Digital & Artificial Intelligence Officer, Advocate Health: “By embedding AI directly into clinical workflows, Advocate Health is focused on practical solutions we can scale across our system while maintaining clinical oversight. AI has tremendous potential to improve care delivery and we are proud to support new opportunities, like Lind, to expand access for patients.”
Pranav Singh, Chief Technology Officer, Co-Founder, Lind: “Designing AI for healthcare requires deep collaboration with health systems like Advocate Health and a clear understanding of how clinicians work. Through our partnership, were focused on building accurate, interoperable and seamlessly integrated technology to support better outcomes for the patients these healthcare systems serve.”
Shrujal Baxi, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Lind: “Clinical trials as a care option are critical for many cancer patients, yet enrollment is often difficult. By combining AI-enabled screening with a clinician review, Lind helps ensure more trials are considered while reducing the burden on clinic staff.”
Media Contacts
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About Advocate Health
Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Advocate Health is the third-largest nonprofit, integrated health system in the United States. A preeminent academic health system at the forefront of clinical excellence, innovation and research, it delivers care under the names Advocate Health Care in Illinois; Atrium Health in the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama; and Aurora Health Care in Wisconsin and Michigan, and Wake Forest University School of Medicine is its academic core. Nationally recognized for expertise in heart and vascular, neurosciences, oncology, pediatrics and rehabilitation, Advocate Health is also a pioneer in the delivery of virtual health care. It is accelerating discovery by making research participation part of the standard-of-care through its one-of-a-kind National Center for Clinical Trials, plus two affiliated life-sciences-focused innovation districts and one of the nation’s largest graduate medical education programs. With more than 165,000 teammates serving patients at 69 hospitals and over 1,000 care locations across eight states, Advocate Health reinvests over $6 billion each year to improve community health, making it one of the nation’s largest providers of community benefit.
About Lind
Lind is a clinical research operations platform partnering with leading health systems and industry to improve clinical trial access and execution. Recognized as part of the CancerX Accelerator, Lind integrates clinician-guided AI into electronic health record workflows to automate patient-trial screening, provide source-linked evidence, and support research teams in identifying patients who may be eligible for studies. Learn more at www.lind.care.
