New Orleans-based Ochsner Health is expanding access to clinical trials through a partnership with Paradigm Health, whose solution connects to the health sysem's EHR and uses AI to more efficiently and accurately evaluate a patient's eligibility.

The nonprofit academic network has 47 hospitals and over 370 clinics and urgent care facilities in the Gulf South. With multiple trial sites throughout Louisiana, Ochsner said it has a strong foundation to expand participation across its network and connect more patients to research opportunities closer to home.

Columbus, Ohio-based Paradigm’s solution allows Ochsner to continuously reassess a broad group of patients as they progress through their care journey and incorporate trial recruitment into routine patient visits, making it easier for patients to learn about trials and consider enrollment as part of their care with clinicians.

Ochsner says deployment of this LLM-based platform has already yielded meaningful results for both its patients and clinical research staff:
• 41% increase in screening capacity: By extending the reach of Ochsner's clinical research team, the platform expanded the number of patients clinically considered for trial participation, helping ensure eligible patients were not overlooked.
• 3.6x increase in patients identified for future trial eligibility: By continuously reviewing patient data, the platform identified patients who were not yet eligible for a clinical trial but could become eligible as they progress through their care journey. This enabled research teams to reassess eligibility in near real time without additional administrative burden.
• 75% reduction in manual effort: AI-powered patient identification and continuous eligibility screening reduced the substantial manual effort required by clinical research coordinators to identify and review potentially eligible patients. The LLM-native eligibility assessment allowed clinical staff to review eligibility of the most likely candidates only and spend more time directly engaging and supporting patients with trial enrollment.

"This partnership has helped us implement a more comprehensive, integrated perspective of our patients' eligibility for trials that extends past individual clinics or specific healthcare encounters," said Nneka Ifejika, M.D., chief scientific officer at Ochsner Health, in a statement. "By pinpointing eligible patients sooner in their treatment path and tracking changing eligibility status, we are making our clinical trial infrastructure more efficient and expanding the reach of Ochsner's research team to consider and enroll more patients in need of trials as a care option.”

Ochsner and Paradigm are not alone in working on this issue. In 2025 Healthcare Innovation interviewed clinical leadership from Cleveland Clinic’s research organization about how they are deploying a solution from startup Dyania Health that uses medically trained large language models (LLMs) to speed up and scale patient identification for research studies.

In December 2025, Paradigm Health, which was founded in 2021, announced it was acquiring Flatiron Health’s clinical research business, which includes an extensive tech-enabled U.S. oncology research network and a suite of clinical research solutions. 

Flatiron had built up an oncology-focused EHR network and a de-identified database with more than 4 million patient records. More than 1,000 research publications have used its EHR-derived real-world data.

Through this transaction for an undisclosed sum, Paradigm Health expanded its network to include more than 25 academic medical centers and health systems, as well as access to nearly 100 community oncology practices nationwide, reaching over 2.4 million patients across the United States.

In April 2026, Paradigm announced a research collaboration with the FDA focused on advancing a new model to accelerate clinical trial execution and regulatory review. The model uses Paradigm's technology-enabled Study Conduct platform to allow real-time review by the FDA, by automating data collection and analysis, and streamlining the reporting of key safety and efficacy signals to trial sponsors and the FDA.