Clinical trials often require participants with specific medical needs and histories. To find the right patients, clinical trial recruiters should keep in mind the following:
- Applicants’ medical records need to be reviewed as early in the process as possible.
- Many researchers and clinical trial recruiters run into obstacles when requesting medical records, which can delay the start date of trials and adversely impact the timely development of new medications and therapies.
- With ChartRequest’s release of information software for clinical trials, medical record retrieval becomes much faster and more streamlined.
- With ChartRequest’s Active Retrieval for clinical trials, you can enjoy cost savings of up to 60 percent and time savings of 90 percent.
Participant recruitment for clinical trials is notoriously challenging and time consuming. Even when researchers or clinical trial recruiters have found a good way to reach their target population and selected potential study participants, they still need to thoroughly review applicants’ medical histories to determine if they’re the right fit before the start date of the trial.
Obstacles in the Release of Information Process
For this reason, it’s critical to access applicants’ medical records as early in the process as possible. However, many researchers and clinical trials recruiters run into obstacles, such as misdirected release of information requests. This can happen when applicants don’t have correct or current information for their healthcare providers, or when records have been reallocated after the closure of a healthcare facility.
Another issue clinical research requestors run into is a lack of response—or a lack of a timely response—from custodians. Release of information staff at healthcare facilities are often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of requests they receive, and their turnaround times can run much longer than anticipated. While they try to process all requests as quickly as possible, many of their ROI processes are still manual and time consuming. On top of that, they may be dealing with numerous subpoenas that, due to the legally mandated response time involved, usually take precedence over other types of requests.
In addition, researchers frequently have to deal with authorization forms for records release being declined. This can happen when they use authorization forms that aren’t state-specific, that are too narrowly focused on a single healthcare provider’s requirements, or that have tight expiration dates that don’t allow sufficient time for medical records collection.
The Effects of Delayed Medical Record Fulfillment for Clinical Trials
When any of these obstacles occur and medical record fulfillment is delayed, researchers or clinical trial recruiters send custodians multiple follow-up faxes and emails, as well as place several phone calls per request in order to figure out where the bottleneck is and how the process can be moved along.
All of this is highly time consuming and detracts resources from core tasks. Furthermore, the start date of trials can be compromised. This can adversely impact the timely development of new medications and therapies—and, as a result, prolong the suffering of patients with serious conditions. Moreover,
Pharmafile reports that delays impact study costs, as well as subsequent sales, and can cause potential losses of between $600,000 and $8 million per day.
Our Platform Offers the Following Features:
- The ability to easily request records from our 15,000+ custodian partners, as well as external providers
- HIPAA-compliant HIE exchange
- User-friendly interface
- The ability to enter patient details once and request records from up to 20 providers across 50 states in one workflow
- Advanced filter and search capabilities
- Convenient stored and shared payment method options
- Real-time, detailed retrieval efforts log
With our advanced software, medical record retrieval becomes simple and streamlined. It’s easy to keep track of submitted requests and all follow-ups regarding a request; plus, requesting records becomes far less time-consuming.
Here Are Just Some of the Benefits
- Savings of up to 60 percent: A clinical researcher earns on average $6,000 per month and can process approximately 80 records per month. With ChartRequest, you’d pay $2,000 or less per month for 80 records requests. That’s a cost-savings of $4,000 per month—or 60 percent. And on top of that, our retrieval fees go down as the number of requests you make go up!
- Time savings of more than 90 percent: At ChartRequest, we’ve calculated that it takes an experienced release of information expert approximately 1.5 hours to process a request in full. That includes entering the request; following up with the custodian by phone, fax, and email; and paying for the order. Professionals whose expertise lies in a different field usually need at least 30 minutes more, which brings the total time per request up to two hours. When you outsource the entire process to us, the amount of time your staff need to request a record becomes literally five minutes or less. So instead of spending 8 hours a day on medical records requests, they’ll be done in 20 minutes—and they can use the rest of the time for their core activities.
- Best-in-class turnaround times: Because we have such strong relationships with more than 15,000 providers, as well as a highly efficient workflow, we can offer a turnaround time of 36 hours for records on any custodian system with which we’re integrated. For records stored elsewhere, we offer an average turnaround time of 18 days or less for complete charts with medical, billing, and image records included.
- In-house medical record fulfillment specialists: Unlike other companies, we never outsource any part of the medical record retrieval process. That’s why you can be sure that your requests are all handled by our in-house staff who leverage their expertise on your behalf.
- Dedicated Customer Success Manager: We provide you with your own dedicated Customer Success Manager who can help you with everything from onboarding to selecting the right authorization forms. It’s their mission to ensure that your experience is as smooth as possible, which is why they’re just an email or phone call away when you have questions or need assistance.
- Coming soon—Digital data delivery ready to be pushed into any API: We ensure that the medical records you request are delivered to you in digital format so you can easily assimilate the data into your database—whether that’s Salesforce or some other solution—and process them according to your own needs. Even if a requested record is released in paper format by the custodian, we’ll scan it and upload the scanned file to your account so it’s ready for your use. It’s all about creating the maximum amount of convenience for your team.
Add Best-in-Class Medical Records Retrieval to Your Winning Team
You want the best researchers in their fields working on your clinical trials—so why not have the best medical records retrieval specialists supporting you during the all-important recruitment phase?
Let us show you how easy medical records retrieval can be with ChartRequest.
Join the fastest-growing tech-enabled, human-powered HIE today!
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Release of Information Solution
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