Recruit--An Ontology Based Information Retrieval System for Clinical Trials Recruitment

Clinical trials are studies designed to assess whether a new intervention is better than the current alternatives. However, most of them fail to recruit participants on schedule. It is hard to use Electronic Health Record (EHR) data to find eligible patients, therefore studies rely on manual assessment, which is time consuming, inefficient and requires specialized training. In this work we describe the design and development of an information retrieval system with the objective of finding eligible patients for cancer trials. The Recruit system has been in use at A. C. Camargo Cancer Center since August/2014 and contains data from more than 500,000 patients and 9 databases. It uses ontologies to integrate data from several sources and represent medical knowledge, which helps enhance results. One can search both in structured data and inside free text reports. The preliminary quality assessments shows excellent recall rates. Recruit proved to be an useful tool for researchers and its modular design could be applied to other clinical conditions and hospitals.