Somerset Partnership Seeks to Increase Patient Participation in Clinical Trials with TriNetX

Somerset Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, which serves a patient population of 650,000 in the south west region of the U.K., is the first integrated mental and community health trust in the NHS to join TriNetX, with the goal of expanding the participation of its patients in clinical trials.

“Our involvement with TriNetX is about providing patients with the opportunity to take part in research,” said Andrew Harewood, Head of Research and Clinical Effectiveness at Somerset Partnership. Part of the NIHR Clinical Research Network: South West Peninsula, Somerset Partnership is actively involved in a number of studies covering a range of specialties including mental health, community health, learning disabilities, diabetes, and stroke, among others. “TriNetX gives us the ability to actually analyse and interrogate our own data in way that enables us to invite more people to be involved.”

Researchers from Somerset Partnership, in conjunction with the local National Institute for Health Research Clinical Research Network and regional counterparts, recognised the benefit of harnessing TriNetX to establish a number of collaborative research networks; initially spanning sall secondary care organisations within the south west to maximise strategic research capabilities, opportunities and enable improved patient choice and outcomes.

TriNetX offers the fastest growing collaborative network of over 70 healthcare organisations representing hundreds of facilities across 11 countries. TriNetX has presented over 1,500 clinical trial opportunities to its healthcare members.

Network members utilise TriNetX’s cloud-based, health research platform to analyse patient populations and perform “what-if” analyses in real-time. As members, healthcare organisations are provided, at no cost to themselves, with all of the hardware, software and services that are needed to integrate with the TriNetX platform.  TriNetX’s unique integration methodology minimises impact to the member’s local IT resources and ensures a rapid and compliant approach, often building on existing data resources such as i2b2 and Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP). Researchers then have access to the institution’s de-identified patient data through a user-friendly interface and a growing number of visualisation and analysis capabilities.

Biopharmaceutical companies and CROs are presented with aggregate views, but each data point in the TriNetX network can be traced to healthcare organisations who have the ability to identify individual patients. This enables clinical researchers to develop virtual patient cohorts that can then be re-identified for potential recruitment into a clinical trial.

“We are extremely pleased and proud to have Somerset Partnership join as our first integrated mental and community health trust within th