Advocate Health Partners With Startup Lind on Clinical Trial Matching

One promising area for AI deployment is clinical trial matching. In one example, Advocate Health is partnering with clinical research operations platform startup Lind to help connect more cancer patients to clinical trials. 

The AI-based Lind platform was recently used in a study at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist’s Comprehensive Cancer Center, which is part of Advocate Health. The retrospective study using real-world data reviewing more than 1,700 individual eligibility criteria, found Lind achieved more than 94% agreement with clinical reviewers and demonstrated strong trial level performance across multiple matching thresholds. 
 
Lind took part in the 2024 CancerX Accelerator, which offers startups an opportunity to propel their solutions by providing resources, support, networking and connections across industry leadership and the public sector through its collaboration with the federal government.

The platform will be embedded into an electronic health record and automatically screens patients for clinical trials. The study shows AI‑enabled trial screening can reduce the time required to assess eligibility from up to an hour per patient to minutes, while still requiring clinical human review for final decisions. Advocate Health said that the human-plus-AI model supports better workflows, patient experiences and efficiencies.  

"There are far too many cancer patients who could benefit from clinical trials as a care option but are never identified because the process is too complex,” said Ruben Mesa, M.D., president of Advocate Health’s Cancer National Service Line, in a statement. “By partnering with Lind, Advocate Health will ensure more patients have access to potentially life-changing treatments without replacing the critical role our clinicians have.” 

With Wake Forest University School of Medicine as its academic core, Advocate Health has launched the first prospective trial to test if Lind can identify more patients who are eligible for trials, increase the number of patients being screened for trials and increase the number of successful enrollments into clinical trials. 
 
In 2025, Advocate Health screened almost 1 million patients for cancer at more than 130 cancer clinics across Wisconsin, Illinois, North Carolina and Georgia – impacting more than 14,000 cancer patients through clinical trial accruals. Currently, Advocate Health is running more than 1,500 cancer clinical trials at more than 50 sites of care. Lind, and its AI-platform, is the next iteration of this work.