Case Study
Enhancing Research Studies, Increasing Clinical Trial Opportunities at West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute
Customer
The West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute, a partner of West Virginia University
Challenge
WVCTSI wanted to increase their access to trial opportunities for investigators and broaden their research capabilities
Solution
WVCTSI joined the TriNetX network to enhance the connection of interested investigators with potential clinical trials in their field of expertise. The TriNetX Research network also provided WVCTSI researchers with access to de-identified real-world data (RWD) from more than 40 healthcare organizations
Results
Since 2018, TriNetX has brought over 200 trial opportunities to WVCTSI and facilitated enhanced research productivity for the institution with the TriNetX Research network
West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute
The West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute (WVCTSI), a partner of West Virginia University (WVU), is an academic home and a catalyst for clinical and translational research that targets priority health areas including addiction and resulting emerging epidemics such as hepatitis C, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and chronic lung disease. WVCTSI provides research resources to WVU faculty and clinicians including biostatistics support, clinical data resources, pre-award support, and access to a range of funding mechanisms and community networks. In 2017, the organization launched WVCTSI Clinical Trials, an initiative focused on increasing opportunities for investigators to lead and patient participation in clinical trials.
“We had only a couple of ways of attracting trial opportunities,” said Wes Kimble, Director of Research Data Analytics at WVCTSI. “Either an investigator would reach out to apply for funding to conduct a trial, or a sponsor would contact one of our principal investigators to see if we wanted to do a trial. As far as access to data, we were limited to querying de-identified patient data from our own hospital EMR.”
TriNetX brought in as additional resource
In an effort to expand industry-sponsored clinical trials, WVCTSI joined the TriNetX network to enhance the connection of interested investigators with potential clinical trials in their field of expertise. The TriNetX Research network also provided WVCTSI researchers with access to de-identified real-world data (RWD) from more than 40 healthcare organizations (HCOs).
“We adopted the TriNetX platform to query data as it was significantly better than what we had been using,” said Kimble. “That became a huge advantage for our investigators.”
Here in West Virginia and Appalachia we have multiple, unique healthcare disparities. TriNetX allows us to run a query on our population, then query the general population and compare the differences and similarities. That has been absolutely wonderful, and it has been particularly valuable when it comes to studying the impact of COVID-19 in rural areas,” said Wes Kimble, WVCTSI.
WVCTSI sees significant benefits from TriNetX implementation
WVCTSI has seen a steady growth of clinical trial opportunities and streamlined access to research data as a result of the partnership with TriNetX. TriNetX has brought over 200 clinical trial opportunities to WVU investigators since it was implemented. TriNetX is also providing investigators with an understanding of the feasibility of clinical trials that they are designing.
Being able to query TriNetX data has helped make the job of our team easier,” said Kimble. “Instead of everyone coming to us for research data and having us pull every requested dataset, people can use the TriNetX platform and analytics to query the dataset on their own. We can now have 300 people pulling data at once and doing their own thing.”
“There have been nineteen publications related to TriNetX queries in the past year,” said Kimble. “Clearly TriNetX has facilitated research productivity. We’re very comfortable that the data coming out of the TriNetX platform is correct and accurate.”
Using TriNetX, researchers from WVU have recently published important papers on the risk of severe COVID-19 in patients with inflammatory bowel disease in United States, the effects of liver disease on COVID-19, creating a coding tool to identify patients with true acute limb ischemia, and studying strokes in young patients with COVID-19.
WVCTSI pleased with TriNetX partnership
“I’m very happy with our relationship with TriNetX,” said Kimble. “The entire TriNetX team has been very responsive to anything we ever need. I really love the platform as does everybody who uses it.”
“The fact that TriNetX strives for such high data accuracy says a lot about the company and the folks that work there and their understanding of actual patient data,” said Kimble. “There are other companies that say they know clinical data, but who may be less attentive to data accuracy. That is certainly not the case with TriNetX.”
Leveraging additional TriNetX capabilities
WVCTSI is looking forward to a continued productive relationship with TriNetX.
“We were working on using the TriNetX natural language processing (NLP) feature before COVID-19 hit,” said Kimble. “We received the necessary approvals and had started working on the abstractions of all clinicians’ notes when we had to put the project on hold. We look forward to getting that project back on track in the future.”
The ability of investigators to access data through TriNetX offers convenience, ultimately improving productivity. I really like the TriNetX offering. I think it’s great,” Kimble added.
“There have been nineteen publications related to TriNetX queries in the past year,” said Kimble. “Clearly TriNetX has facilitated research productivity. We’re very comfortable that the data coming out of the TriNetX platform is correct and accurate.”
Using TriNetX, researchers from WVU have recently published important papers on the risk of severe COVID-19 in patients with inflammatory bowel disease in United States, the effects of liver disease on COVID-19, creating a coding tool to identify patients with true acute limb ischemia, and studying strokes in young patients with COVID-19.
About WVCTSI
WVCTSI was created to find real solutions for the health problems facing the people of West Virginia. Funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences Clinical and Translational Research IDeA (CTR) Award, we have established crosscutting research partnerships among the WVCTSI partner institutions and our collaborating Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) institutions to increase research capacity for purposes of improving the health of West Virginians. WVCTSI is driving real solutions for better health.
Participating faculty and clinicians across the state are provided with research resources that include biostatistics support, clinical data resources, pre-award support and access to a range of funding mechanisms, and community networks.
WVCTSI has developed a strong infrastructure to increase the number of extramural funded clinical and translational researchers and has grown capacity while developing new ideas and research opportunities to find real health solutions for West Virginians. For more visit www.wvctsi.org.
About TriNetX
TriNetX is the global health research network that connects the world of drug discovery and development from pharmaceutical company to study site, and investigator to patient by sharing real-world data to make clinical and observational research easier and more efficient. TriNetX combines real time access to longitudinal clinical data with state-of-the-art analytics to optimize protocol design and feasibility, site selection, patient recruitment, and enable discoveries through the generation of real-world evidence. The TriNetX platform is HIPAA and GDPR compliant. For more information, visit TriNetX at www.trinetx.com or follow @TriNetX on Twitter.