Improving The Clinical Trial Search Process And Experience With An AI-Powered Virtual Agent

Wake Forest’s current process is manual and uses a traditional approach in which one nurse assists the patient and/or relatives to find relevant clinical trials during normal business hours. This has several shortcomings and challenges, including inability to provide round-the-clock assistance, delays in the request handling as only one nurse handles all the participant’s queries, and lack of uniformity in the categorization of trials and current filtering which is only done based on the category of the disease. In addition, their existing website search for clinical trials filters data only on the basis of high-level categories, such as cancer type, which turns up many irrelevant trials; resulting in patients having to filter out the resultant trials manually based on any additional information about their condition. Thus, Wake Forest wanted to implement a chatbot that could assist patients in their search for clinical trials offered at their Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Solution

Quantiphi developed an AI-powered multichannel virtual agent for Wake Forest to effectively assist cancer patients in finding clinical trials relevant to their condition. The chatbot was deployed on Wake Forest’s clinical trials webpage where users can interact via chat, text, or telephony as per their preference and accessibility. Participants can now ask queries outside of business hours with round-the-clock response provided by the virtual agent. In addition, the nurses can reach out to the participant for any relevant future trials based on the previously captured consent and participant information. In case the nurse is unavailable, the participant is called back at a later time with the complete context of the earlier conversation and suggestions of the clinical trials, improving the participant experience.

Result

Personalized responses to participant queries
Reduced dependency on single nurse to answer all participant queries
Deployed across multiple platforms for an omnichannel experience