The process of accurately identifying eligible patients for clinical trials has been a major bottleneck for decades. Medical records are messy, and diagnosis codes often reflect billing needs rather than a patient’s true clinical status, making it difficult to figure out who truly meets a trial’s inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Last week, Mass General Brigham spun out a new company to commercialize a generative AI-powered screening platform designed to help simplify this process.
The company, named AIwithCare, officially launched on Friday. It uses large language models to interpret both structured and unstructured clinical data, leading to faster and more accurate patient screening for trials.
At most health systems, trial recruitment depends on clinically trained staff devoting hours per day to manual chart review, noted Dr. A.J. Blood, a cardiologist at Mass General Brigham and CEO of AIwithCare.
“It’s a time consuming, labor-intensive, mind-numbing process,” he declared.
He and his team of fellow researchers at Mass General’s Accelerator for Clinical Transformation began building AIwithCare’s generative AI engine in the beginning of 2023, when large language models like ChatGPT were gaining widespread popularity.
The platform is designed to interpret the full clinical context of data rather than rely on unreliable billing codes, Dr. Blood explained. The goal is for more hospitals to be able to automatically evaluate patients against complex trial inclusion and exclusion criteria at scale.
Dr. Blood pointed out that the platform has been validated in peer-reviewed research — a study published in JAMA this year found that the rate of enrollment using AIwithCare was nearly double that of traditional manual screening.
With its entrance into the market, AIwithCare now competes with other companies selling AI tools to improve clinical trial recruitment and enrollment like Antidote, Tempus and Trialspark — but Dr. Blood highlighted that AIwithCare’s platform can be expanded beyond clinical trial recruitment to applications in safety, quality and clinical operations by rapidly and accurately interpreting medical data.
The company is now scaling its technology to other health systems, research networks, life sciences companies, drugmakers and device firms, he said.
Dr. Blood noted that AIwithCare aims not only to streamline clinical trial recruitment but also help transform how hospitals and research organizations use AI to improve patient care and operational efficiency.
Photo: Wong Yu Liang, Getty Images
