An assessment of the NAVIFY clinical trial match application using clinical simulation-based research methods.

Abstract

e13552 Background: Cancer clinical trials require matching patients to strict, and sometimes lengthy, eligibility criteria. NAVIFY Clinical Trial Match (CTM) is a digital solution that uses data on an individual patient’s condition, genomic alterations and institution’s postal code to automatically find suitable clinical trials. We assessed the efficiency, accuracy and cognitive burden of NAVIFY CTM on matching patients to cancer clinical trials in the UK. Methods: 10 clinicians (8 medical doctors, 2 clinical trial practitioners) participated. Synthetic patient cases were developed with input from two oncologists, a histopathologist and a radiologist. Participants were instructed to identify appropriate trials for five patients using the NAVIFY CTM and five patients with the legacy approach (i.e. online trial databases) within one hour. For each method, participants were advised to approach the exercise with the level of scrutiny employed in a normal clinical setting. The efficiency, quality, and cognitive burden of trial matching was measured for each participant. The quality of trial matches was independently scored by an oncologist who did not participate in the simulations. The cognitive burden was measured subjectively, via a single-item questionnaire used to measure mental effort (Paas scale), and objectively, via Stroop test before and after each method. A survey was also conducted. Results: Efficiency: Participants completed the trial matching more efficiently using NAVIFY CTM, with trial matches completed on average one minute and 42 seconds faster using the digital solution (n = 73 matches) compared with the most commonly used online trial database, ClinicalTrials.gov (n = 52). Participants were more likely to ‘completely agree’ that they had enough time to complete the task using the NAVIFY CTM (70%) compared to online trial databases (40%). Quality of the matches: On the survey, more participants reported that trial suggestions were ‘mostly relevant’ for NAVIFY CTM (70%) compared with ClinicalTrials.gov (30%). The quality of trial matches was the same for both methods (as scored independently by an oncologist). Cognitive burden: On the subjective measure of cognitive burden, more participants required ‘low’ or ‘rather low’ mental effort to use NAVIFY CTM (50%) compared to online trial databases (7%). On the objective measure, there is a seemingly less pronounced Stroop effect (often interpreted as higher mental agility) using NAVIFY CTM vs. legacy approach. Conclusions: Preliminary findings suggest that, compared to online trial databases, the NAVIFY CTM can reduce the amount of time to match patients to clinical trials, provide more relevant trial suggestions, and decrease self-reported mental effort for the decision-maker.