CU Cancer Center Using Flatiron’s EHR-to-EDC Connector
A collaboration between Flatiron Health, the CU Cancer Center, and UCHealth is using technology to improve the efficiency of clinical studies and research.
Flatiron Clinical Pipe, an electronic health record (EHR)-to-electronic data capture (EDC) connector, is designed to reduce the time and effort of clinical study data capture.
Flatiron Health, which has built up an oncology-focused EHR network and a de-identified database with more than 4 million patient records, recently announced a milestone of over 1,000 research publications using its EHR-derived real-world data.
Through Flatiron’s integration with UCHealth's EHR, Flatiron Clinical Pipe will enable researchers to avoid time-consuming, error-prone, duplicative data entry tasks by enabling the direct transfer of data from the EHR to EDC.
Reducing site burden and improving study efficiencies will enable sites like CU Cancer Center and UCHealth to conduct more trials and streamline clinical trial data acquisition for sponsors, ultimately accelerating evidence generation and improvements in care for people with cancer, Flatiron said.
“Collaborating with the CU Cancer Center and UCHealth, market-leading and innovative cancer care providers, is an incredible opportunity to advance our shared vision to reimagine how clinical trials are executed,” said Emily Akin, head of research network at Flatiron Health, in a statement. “Flatiron Clinical Pipe—currently in use at over 85 academic medical centers and community oncology sites, representing a network of over 300 unique locations—reduces the burden on clinical trial site teams, streamlines data management and accelerates study timelines.”
“CU Cancer Center and our expert physicians and staff members are excited to continue being at the forefront of innovation in oncology research and collaborate with Flatiron Health on technology to reduce burden through technology-supported trials,” said Christopher Lieu, M.D., associate director of clinical research at the CU Cancer Center, in a statement. “Flatiron’s Clinical Pipe technology will support our trial teams and enable our network of providers to provide the best care possible, balancing patient needs with more efficient data management.”
In November 2024, Neal Meropol, M.D., Flatiron’s vice president of research oncology, spoke about how Clinical Pipe could also help community oncology practices engage in more clinical research.
“One of the things that that we've really built out over the past several years is the provision of software and services to community oncologists to better enable them to take part in clinical trials,” Meropol said. “That includes helping with clinical trial recruitment patient matching, but also with the transfer of data from the electronic health record to study databases. So we have a tool called Clinical Pipe that is a data transfer tool for clinical trials, which reduces site burden and enables more sites to participate in more studies than they might otherwise have been able to do.”
Community oncologists, in fact, are often very interested in building out their clinical research capabilities, but the investments in clinical research in an academic center and in the community practice may be very different,” he added. “What we're trying to do is help support the infrastructure of conducting research in routine care settings. So we're trying to align clinical studies with clinical care, and in doing so, make it more of a routine approach to how patients are cared for.”
