Improving Patient Outcomes with Tech and Molecular Diagnostics
Molecular diagnostic technology has the ability to improve patient outcomes, create clear data-driven insights for physicians, and help sponsors select appropriate sites for a trial. We connected with expert, Carla Balch, to understand exactly how these benefits can be realized.
Spesana Founder and CEO Carla Balch has spent most of her life in the world of clinical research. She began her career in Supportive Oncology Services at the West Cancer Center in Memphis, TN before joining Altos Solutions, the first oncology-specific service for electronic medical records. After working under Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, she developed a passion for molecular diagnostics that she channeled into creating her start-up, Spesana.
With Spesana, providers can quickly analyze data from molecular diagnostic tests and better understand which patients are eligible for clinical trials. In turn, research institutes can collaborate with physicians to find the right patients for a trial before choosing a site.
Carla Balch recently sat down with Blake Adams, VP of Marketing for Florence Healthcare, on Florence’s podcast, The Next Phase: Exploring Innovation in Clinical Trials. The two discussed how technologies like Florence and Spesana could lead to more effective clinical trials and, ultimately, improved patient outcomes.
Listen to their full conversation on the podcast episode, “Improving Collaboration in Molecular Diagnostics,” and keep reading to discover the most important takeaways from their conversation.
What does Spesana do?
Spesana is software designed to help doctors and pharmaceutical companies choose participants for clinical trials based on molecular diagnostics. Physicians can use Spesana to order molecular diagnostic tests for potential participants. When the tests come back, Spesana organizes the results and combines that data with clinical trial exclusion and inclusion criteria so physicians can easily see whether the patient is eligible for a clinical trial.
On the pharmaceutical research side, Spesana helps pharma companies find locations that have the right patients for their clinical trials. The goal is for sponsors to hold trials at sites with eligible patient populations instead of choosing sites based on familiarity or past experience.
Why is molecular diagnostic software important?
Balch noted that when it comes to the world of clinical trial workflow, she “doesn’t see much difference from where I was 21 years ago.”
Hospital employees still frantically scan thick charts to determine whether patients match the criteria for a clinical trial, and this results in many eligible patients being missed, especially when those patients are of lower socioeconomic status or live far away from major research centers.
Because Spesana integrates multiple electronic medical records, it allows context “so the physician can view that patient as a whole person.” By looking at all of a patient’s records and molecular diagnostic data at once, a physician can ensure their patient gets the right treatment and joins a clinical trial for targeted immunological therapies if they’re eligible.
How does molecular diagnostic technology help physicians?
Balch believes she doesn’t need to convince physicians that molecular diagnostics are important. Most doctors already recognize that molecular diagnostics are critical to improving patient treatment. However, physicians sometimes hesitate to order molecular diagnostic tests because they’re not sure which test to order, tests are expensive, and test results often come back in dense, lengthy reports.
Since oncologists can see up to 40 patients per day, they often only have 15-20 minutes to decide on a patient’s treatment plan. They lack time to dissect lengthy test results, especially when those results are separate from the rest of a patient’s electronic medical records.
Spesana not only integrates molecular diagnostics data with a patient’s EMRs but also offers visualization-based tools to help medical practitioners quickly analyze the data and make efficient clinical decisions.
How does molecular diagnostic technology help sponsors and CROs?
Sponsors and Clinical Research Organizations (CROs) often have favorite physicians, investigators, and sites that they return to again and again for clinical trials. The sponsor may not even know if a site has a sufficient number of eligible patients when they elect to hold a trial at a site.
That’s where Spesana comes in. Sponsors and CROs can use Spesana and EMRs to find locations that have many patients with a particular molecular diagnostic result. The sponsor then knows that they’ll have strong candidates for targeted therapy clinical trials at a particular site, even if it’s a research site they previously had not considered.
Many healthcare providers also wish they had more of a voice in helping sponsors set inclusion and exclusion criteria. Physicians who see patients every day often have a strong grasp of which patients may need to be involved in clinical trials. Spesana helps sponsors and CROs collaborate with doctors to ensure more patients become eligible for cutting-edge treatments.
What goals do Spesana and Florence share?
Balch says that Spesana has two major goals: giving healthcare providers a data-driven workflow for getting the right patients into clinical trials, and helping pharmaceutical companies collaborate with healthcare providers on inclusion and exclusion criteria and choosing clinical trial sites.
Florence Healthcare also strives to improve patient outcomes by streamlining clinical trial workflows. Florence’s software helps research sites, sponsors, and CROs manage and track their clinical trial records while remaining in compliance. The two software systems can work together to ensure electronic medical records are up-to-date with molecular diagnostic data and other forms of health data throughout the clinical trial process.
In Balch’s words, the ultimate goal is cures, and we achieve those cures through “data transparency across companies, collaboration, and making sure that every patient’s treatment is chosen not only from an economic standpoint but from a biological standpoint.”
Florence and Spesana share this commitment to transparency, collaboration, and finding the best treatments for patients.
Learn More About How Technology Can Improve Patient Outcomes
If you’re curious about Spesana, Florence, and other technology leaders in the healthcare industry, check out the Florence Healthcare podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. We’ve got the latest news about innovations in the healthcare technology industry, as well as interviews with thought leaders like Carla Balch and Beth Harper. Just click the subscribe button to join us.
The Next Phase Podcast: Exploring Innovation in Clinical Trials
Inspired by the industry’s gaps and issues exposed during the Covid-19 crisis, the podcast focuses on sites, sponsors, and CROs leveraging technology to support a new, more remote era of clinical research. See all the episodes here.