Stop Reconciling. Start Deciding. The Case for Connected Site Intelligence

How TriNetX Terrain and SunshineMD bring patient counts, site data, and more than 12,000 investigators into one view

By Emily Noss, Associate Director, Product Management, TriNetX, LLC 

Every site selection team knows the feeling: patient counts in one place, site details in another, investigator history somewhere else entirely. Traditional clinical trial feasibility often relies on assumptions rather than evidence about where eligible patients can be found. Real-world data (RWD) give study teams a concrete starting point, providing evidence of where patients who match a study’s cohort criteria can be found. For most clinical trials, if those patients are not at a site, they cannot be recruited there. That is why we see an opportunity to ground site selection in patient data rather than assumptions from historical data. 

TriNetX LIVE™ helps study teams see not just whether patients are represented in the data, but where. Teams build queries using a protocol’s inclusion and exclusion criteria, then run analyses that include location-based patient counts. But a patient count is where site selection starts, not where it ends. 

Knowing That Patients Exist Is Only the First Question

For sponsors and contract research organizations (CROs), finding patients eligible for a unique clinical trial raises the next set of site-selection questions. Many healthcare organizations (HCOs) in our network are large and geographically distributed. Where within an organization could patients be recruited? What research experience and capabilities does the institution have? Which investigators are research experienced, do they specialize in the indication, and where are there opportunities to engage new investigators? 

The challenge is no longer just finding patients. It is reconciling patient counts with recruitment locations, institutional capabilities, and investigator experience to decide which sites to approach. 

Three Pieces, One View 

Choosing a site well depends on three things at once:  

• Where cohort-eligible patients are located,  

• What relevant experience each site and its investigators have, and  

• How to reach the right people at those sites.  

Those pieces arrive as different kinds of data, including locations, patient counts, investigators, and trial history. The real value comes from harmonizing them so teams can navigate them together. 

TriNetX Terrain brings curated site and investigator data together with patient counts in a single place, giving teams connected site intelligence. Built in response to customer feedback, it combines deeper data from our HCO partners and third-party sources to support site exploration and outreach. Teams can move from the full HCO network to the individual sites where care is delivered, then to the investigators who would run the study. 

Closing the Investigator Data Gap with SunshineMD

Investigator detail is one of the additions most requested by sponsors and CROs, and historically one of the harder gaps to fill. Through our partnership with SunshineMD, we now include more than 12,000 investigators, substantially expanding the available investigator data. The database draws on federally required Open Payments reporting rather than investigator self-reporting to capture investigators and their trial histories. 

Open Payments data are publicly available, but turning them into usable investigator records takes substantial cleaning and standardization. SunshineMD brings experience with payments data. They cleaned and standardized the source data, built trial investigator records, and added unique identifiers and contact information. By working with SunshineMD, we were able to efficiently integrate prepared records with our own HCO-provided data. This reflects our approach across data sources: give customers high-quality information that is ready to use, rather than pass along raw data. 

The partnership also adds enrollment performance indicators. Two quartile measures show how investigators have performed across previous sponsored trials and how quickly their studies got underway. SunshineMD created these signals from trial payments data and validated them against real-world enrollment data. 

This matters at the moment a team is assessing investigator fit. Sponsors and CROs know their own trial history, but not necessarily how an investigator enrolled on another sponsor’s trial. Seeing performance across sponsors and studies gives a signal about investigators who are new to them and lets a team expand its pool in a data-driven fashion. 

Transparency Works in Both Directions

HCOs in the TriNetX network see the same information about their institution and investigators that sponsors and CROs see. That gives them deeper insight into trial history at their own institution. They can connect the right trial to an available investigator, plan and coordinate research support, and become more visible to sponsors. 

Meeting Teams Where They Work

Teams work in different ways, so TriNetX Terrain meets them where they are, including in the TriNetX LIVE™ user interface, through a downloaded spreadsheet, or through an API connection into a centralized trial planning system. An artificial intelligence (AI) assistant is planned as another way to navigate the data and ask questions. 

Whatever the interface, the goal is the same: bring together where patients are, what research experience exists, and who can run the study, so teams can spend less time reconciling information and more time deciding which sites to approach. 

About Emily Noss
Emily is Associate Director, Product Management at TriNetX, where she creates solutions that help life sciences and healthcare organizations use real-world data to advance clinical research.