For months, clinical trials have been a fixture of the public’s collective gaze. The arrival of COVID-19 has made all of us stakeholders in the quest to find effective treatments and vaccines, as quickly and efficiently as possible.

As that extra attention put the clinical trial process under a microscope, it quickly became clear that the same speed bumps that had slowed the process in the past were even more prevalent now. The challenges of connecting with providers, identifying relevant patient populations, and finding those eligible for a trial were further amplified by the fact that foundational systems and processes in the drug development pipeline were disrupted by the pandemic.

Of course, this wasn’t a new problem. COVID-19 is the latest example of an urgent unmet medical need, but, for years, myriad complex conditions have sent life sciences companies on a proverbial race against the clock for suitable treatments. And, for years, the process of identifying the right patients and providers has been costly and inefficient. That’s why at Komodo Health, we have aimed to streamline that process with our suite of industry-leading clinical development software, in the hopes of reducing the burden of these diseases.

Take the area of patient recruitment. Traditional tools that have been utilized for patient recruitment lack a complete view of eligible populations. They rely on slower mechanisms, like individual recruiters and in-person networks of professionals to populate a trial’s ranks, and those don’t always capture everyone. Often, additional patients are right under a recruiter’s nose.

Patients may be at a contracted site, but are often scattered at satellite locations. Meanwhile, providers are running too many trials and are either unaware of a certain trial or lack the ability to scale wide enough to identify all that are eligible. That leaves 20-35% of eligible patients who are already at contracted sites that are never even screened.

That recruitment gap widens when recruitment is taken off-site. Half of eligible patients receive treatment for their illness out in the community, giving recruiters a wider base of potential enrollees that are within three hours of a trial site. But with no way to identify who they are, those patients are often overlooked.

Finally, many screening-eligible patients are located in remote pockets of the US and are hard to reach, but will “supercommute” for a chance at a life-saving trial. Due to their lack of proximity to a trial site and lack of visibility around their potential eligibility for trial, these patients are commonly ignored despite their willingness to travel.

We can close these gaps across the continuum with our Pulse solution. By taking patient-level data that is usually siloed and culling it to make it actionable, all in real time, companies can valuably curtail the average clinical trial time. That’s the promise that the emergence of real-time patient-level data holds – to speed up drug development.

Poring over bibliographic references and wading through EHR data to power patient recruitment and site selection certainly has its place. But the true potential of an effective trial is only unlocked when it’s paired with a 360-degree view of the entire patient spectrum. It’s time the industry adopted a clinical trials recruitment process that is as scientifically robust and patient-driven as the trials themselves.

Whether it is COVID-19 or the countless other illnesses that afflict patients around the world, the stakes are too high to do anything less.