Last week, we unveiled new AI-powered patient pre-screening capabilities in the Inato platform.
Identifying and pre-screening patients for trial opportunities has historically been an incredibly time-consuming, burdensome task for sites. Inato has reimagined this process, leveraging a series of artificial intelligence (AI) models to empower sites to efficiently and accurately review patient records at scale.
We worked directly with trial sponsors and research sites to develop and pilot the new capabilities. Pantheon Clinical Research–a Utah-based site with more than three decades of experience in clinical trials across a range of therapeutic areas, including gastroenterology, psychiatry, cardiovascular, and more–was among our earliest pre-screening users.
We sat down with Mari Livermore, the Site Director and CEO at Pantheon Clinical Research, to learn more about her team’s experience with patient pre-screening and how Inato helps them stay on the cutting-edge of research innovation.
Mari, thanks for chatting with us. To start, can you share a bit more with us about your work with Inato up to this point?
We started using Inato in early 2024 and we’ve found it to be a really valuable tool to access trials that we may not otherwise have seen or applied to. Within a few months, we were selected for two exciting opportunities–a COPD trial and an adolescent bipolar-1 trial–that have allowed us to bring new options to patients in our community.
Then, Inato approached us about patient pre-screening and asked if we’d be interested in helping them shape and pilot the new capabilities. To us, it was a no-brainer. We saw this as a clear opportunity to introduce AI to help streamline our workflows and reduce the burden on our staff.
What did your patient screening process look like prior to now?
Historically, patient pre-screening was a painstaking manual process. I would sit down with my yellow highlighter in one hand and a 500-page medical record in the other and I’d go through comparing the patient information against a list of inclusion and exclusion criteria. Some days, I would spend an hour reading a chart, only to discover that the patient wasn’t eligible. It was both tedious and one of our most time-consuming processes. Now, Inato can manage this for us.
We’re starting to see more buzz around AI in drug development, but it’s still early for most applications in clinical trials. What inspired you to take the leap and implement it into your workflow?
Research is always evolving and we want to stay ahead of the curve. 30 years ago, I did everything with paper and pen. Then everything became digital, and now we’re seeing this greater push into data and AI. I love being an early adopter and getting to be part of how the industry is changing.
What I like about the pre-screening feature specifically is that AI is used to support our team, not to make unilateral decisions about patient eligibility. It provides a snapshot of which criteria are met and unmet–with a rationale and specific sources in the patient record to verify–and my team still makes the final determination. This enables us to work more efficiently while still retaining the human touch.
What benefits or results have you and the rest of the staff at Pantheon Clinical Research noticed so far?
The impact has really been immediate. Inato is saving us significant time and resources on patient pre-screening and freeing our staff up to do other things. The platform reviews patient records in just a couple of minutes and can assess them for multiple trials at once, which is a huge time saver for our team. We’ve already cut pre-screening times by more than half, which in turn sets us up to accelerate enrollment across our portfolio.
What’s next? How do you see your use of Inato patient pre-screening evolving?
I think we’re just scratching the surface. We’re already using the capabilities every day for pre-screening, but they could be just as valuable for feasibility. We could use Inato to compare our patients against new protocols, understand how many are eligible, and make an informed decision about whether or not it’s worth our time and energy to apply. Our ultimate goal is to use Inato to enhance all of our early trial operations–finding and assessing trials, putting together strong applications, and pre-screening patients for new opportunities. We’re excited to continue collaborating with the Inato team in 2025.
To learn more about Inato’s pre-screening capabilities, click here.