What is AI Patient Recruitment?
TL;DR
A method that uses AI to analyze electronic health records (EHRs) and rapidly find candidate patients matching a trial's inclusion/exclusion criteria—solving the biggest bottleneck in clinical trials.
AI Patient Recruitment: Definition & Explanation
AI patient recruitment is a method that uses AI to accelerate the step that is the biggest bottleneck in clinical trials: finding and enrolling patients who meet the criteria. Companies like Deep 6 AI, Tempus, and Medidata work in this space.\n\nTrials have complex inclusion/exclusion criteria (age, medical history, lab values, concomitant medications, genetic mutations, and more), and finding matching patients in hospital records traditionally took research coordinators weeks to months by hand. AI patient recruitment uses natural language processing (NLP) to analyze not only structured EHR data but also unstructured text such as physician notes and imaging reports, extracting candidate patients in minutes.\n\nThis can shorten enrollment periods, increase registrations per site, and broaden the trials patients can access. At the same time, you must protect patient data privacy (HIPAA/GDPR), guard against selection bias from skewed source data, and uphold the principle that a physician makes the final eligibility decision. Combined with decentralized clinical trials (DCT), reach to geographically distant patients also expands.