SCRS Talks
SCRS Talks, hosted by the Society for Clinical Research Sites (SCRS), is a platform for clinical research industry professionals to hear about valuable information shaping the research industry today. These short interviews will provide new perspectives and insights on pressing topics, current events, and the research community.
SCRS Talks
Utilizing Technology to Simplify Clinical Trial Participation
As technology drives breakthroughs in clinical research, it's also transforming how clinical trials are managed. Join Clay Williams, Vice President of Mobile Applications at Greenphire, to learn how their platform GreenSpace is simplifying clinical trial participation. From submitting receipts to tracking reimbursements, hear how GreenSpace removes barriers for both participants and sites, and how it’s impacting projects like the Metastatic Breast Cancer Alliance's patient registry.
Greetings and thank you for being part of the Society for Clinical Research Sites for SCRS Talks. I'm your host, Jimmy Bechtel, the Vice President of Site Engagement with the Society. Get ready to dive into pressing clinical research industry topics, celebrate noteworthy achievements, and create a deeper connection within the research community. This is a space for us to amplify voices and perspectives that shape the landscape of clinical research. Today, I'm lucky to have Clay Williams, the Vice President of Mobile Applications with Greenphire, here to let us know and share a little bit more about a newer program that Greenphire has in development called GreenSpace. Clay, it's great to have you. Really excited to talk about this program and its effect on clinical research and clinical trials and medicine overall. But before we dive into that, I'd love to learn a little bit more about you.
Clay Williams:Thanks so much, Jimmy. I'm really happy to be on the program and I'm delighted to talk about GreenSpace. So I am Clay Williams. I am a computer scientist by training. I did a PhD in computational biology and then spent a couple of years at Columbia University Medical Center, where I worked more on the clinical side of the world with electronic health records. After that, I went to IBM Research where I didn't work in healthcare for a number of years, but more in the pure computer science side of things. I left research in 2013 and founded my own company, called Medaptive Health, which we built some technology that was meant for clinical research. And in late 2021, Greenphire acquired that technology. And I came along with that acquisition and have been the V. P. of Mobile Applications since then.
Jimmy Bechtel:Excellent. Quite the journey. Research is something you kind of stumble into and it's never a straight and narrow path. So again, Clay, thanks for being with us here today. I'm really excited to talk about GreenSpace. So if you wouldn't mind let's jump in here, talk a little bit about what it is and what it's program goals are, and maybe a little bit about how the idea of developing this participant facing application was really brought about.
Clay Williams:Sure. Yes. So GreenSpace is a participant engagement, a participant convenience platform. It is mobile first, but not mobile only. And what we mean by that is that we pay a lot of attention to the mobile experience, but we also support patients who participants who prefer to use the web. Now, very importantly, you know, we all walk around with a phone in our pocket, and anywhere you go, you watch people, they're used to living their lives largely empowered by their devices. So that's one of the reasons we decided to make GreenSpace mobile first. And a key thing about GreenSpace is it aligns very seamlessly with Greenphire's existing products. So ClinCard, back in February, we acquired ClinCierge, which is a travel planning company for clinical trials, and GreenSpace is a conduit for all of the information that is important to participants to flow from tools in those platforms to the participant. So a participant may use GreenSpace to look at their, let's say they're in a ClinCard study, look at the balance on their card or the amount that's been transferred to their bank account. If they're in a direct deposit reimbursement type study, they may use it to submit a receipt. A big pain point is, you know, remembering your receipts, if you incur expenses on the way to or from a trial, bringing the receipt to the site the next time you come. Now, the idea for GreenSpace, and I'll go a little bit more into GreenSpace as we go through the questions. But the idea for this came from, first of all, knowing a number of people personally who were in clinical trials and hearing what their experience was with some of the more what we may almost consider mundane aspects, but really challenging aspects when you're dealing perhaps with a serious medical condition, a lot of uncertainty in your life already, and you have to manage this whole new process. So I was very intrigued at what we could bring to bear on that problem for those participants to make their lives easier and more convenient.
Jimmy Bechtel:That's great Clay, and I think it's really important that, like you said, some of the great things that you highlighted in this is that we're focusing on making the participation in clinical trials easier using technology and how we bring about their simplicity for not only getting to a clinical trial, but also ultimately participating in it. So, that's great. I think it's awesome and commendable that, we're developing programs like this. So we know financial and logistical barriers are really major obstacles as you kind of started to allude to in trial participation. So I guess let's start with talking about how GreenSpace helps remove some of those barriers and address those specifically.
Clay Williams:Yeah, I'm excited about this. I think it's important for, given that this is a research sites focused podcast, to also make sure we know that our sites know that we've thought about them as we've looked at GreenSpace as well. So, if you think about the financial barriers to participation, ClinCard helped remove a lot of those barriers for people. But there are still some things that are challenging. I mentioned one earlier, which is if a participant does incur expenses traveling to or especially from a trial site, they may need to capture receipts. And bring those to the study site or transmit them to the study site in a way that they can be, retained, and they can be reimbursed. And we all know, if you're like me, remembering to bring the receipt, remembering to store it someplace safe a month later, when you go to your next site visit, remembering it all of that can be a challenge. And also for the sites, if somebody emails you a PDF of the receipts, or gets it to you some other way, sends you a photo, the site has to do the same thing. They have to remember they get it in email, they have to put it in the right place. They have to manage it the right way. GreenSpace does things like allow a participant to take a screenshot, a snapshot of a receipt and submit it into ClinCard directly. And for the site that receipt is already captured. It is within the ClinCard system. So we remove all that friction for the participant to remember where the receipt is to bring it with them and for the site also to have to juggle it when they are handed a receipt or emailed the receipt. So it's a very seamless interaction, and it's as simple as you finished eating at a restaurant. You're on your way home from your clinical trial. It's a four hour trip. You stop and have some lunch. It's a reimbursable expense. You snap your receipt right there with GreenSpace. And it flows to your site without any extra hassle on you. GreenSpace does also let participants look at their card balance or the amount of money that has been deposited in their account. They can see the status of all expenses in process within GreenSpace to know what's being reviewed, what's been paid, et cetera. So it is really a way to remove burden from the participants mind. And as we go further into this year, participants will also be able to view their ride shares and travel itineraries for travel within GreenSpace. This is a feature that is being worked on right now and will be launched later in fourth quarter. So GreenSpace becomes the one stop hub in their hand for managing their participation in the trial.
Jimmy Bechtel:Really an interesting concept, Clay, because when you think about the steps, it reminds me of how some of us, you know, submit just our regular expense reports, right? It's just a classic case of how we take a concept that kind of exists maybe in other spaces. Granted, understanding the tremendous nuance that goes into patient payments, of course but the nuance that exists in other places and applying it to clinical research really in an effective way to simplify what can be such a convoluted and cumbersome process. We talk all the time about ways that we can make things simple for patients and easier for them and take some of the burden away. And that should definitely apply to the reimbursement that we provide them for their participation in our clinical trials. So it's really cool to hear about a novel platform, a novel program that helps enable some of that work through, again, a model that in some ways exists in the space that a lot of us have lived and worked in for so long.
Clay Williams:Exactly when I looked at this, I thought about, I was, when I've owned my own business, I've used QuickBooks, for instance, and you can snapshot your receipts to save for reimbursement and where the nuances come in inside of GreenSpace and ClinCard is we've really thought about that experience. Like, the participant submits their receipt. They have to provide as little information as possible because most of it's on the receipt. But then the receipt shows up at the site and let's say the site realizes they need to get approval from the sponsor. Traditionally, then all of a sudden the question of, okay, we need to obfuscate information on the receipt, perhaps, how do we do that? Part of this whole initiative was they can do it right there in their browser. They can literally look at the receipt image and say, oh, it's got a first name on it. It was a restaurant. They took the first name and I just want to swipe over that name, and I've redacted that piece of information, and so we've really thought about the participant experience and working closely with the ClinCard team, the site experience. So it is, you said, it's an, idea that is kind of out there snapshotting your receipts, but we've thought about it carefully from the clinical trials point of view.
Jimmy Bechtel:That's incredible. It's great. And iterating right and learning, okay, this is how this is gone. Now let's see how we can make it better for and improve upon that process as we apply it to the clinical trial space, which it's, it's really, really cool and exciting to hear about. So I know that there are some organizations out there that have utilized GreenSpace. So can you talk a little bit about how Metastatic Breast Cancer Alliance is utilizing the GreenSpace technology.
Clay Williams:Sure. So MBCA or the Metastatic Breast Cancer Alliance is a patient advocacy group focused on patients with metastatic disease, metastatic breast cancer. And they launched a registry on GreenSpace. They're actually the longest running study on GreenSpace today. They've been live almost 6 years and they use it as a patient experience registry is the way it's described. It is an observational study and it is I. R. B. It's an I. R. B. approved observational study and they do everything on GreenSpace from consent new participants into the platform. They offer a number of surveys that capture information about a patient's demographics, their history with the disease, their quality of life, understanding sort of the experience of living with metastatic breast cancer. They also allow patients to create treatment lines themselves. So if they move from one treatment to another, they can input that into GreenSpace and have a record for themselves that they can easily request a PDF from GreenSpace and keep track of what their treatments have been. And finally, one of their most important features is we have a clinical trial matching feature. We work with a clinical trial matching partner out of San Francisco called the Quantum Leap Healthcare Collaborative, and they can take information about disease states patients have reported in these surveys and treatments they have been on and let them know about trials that they may be a fit for and we provide information. All that trial information is geographically sorted. So you see the trials closest to you that are appropriate for the type of cancer you have, including certain biomarkers, like E. R., P. R., and Her2 biomarkers that indicate what kinds of therapies the cancer may respond to. And so patients get, if they have opted in for trial matching, they receive every night we run trials, trial match run for the patients who are opted in. And in the morning, if they have new matches, they'll get a notification and learn about what may be available. And if a patient's on stable treatment right now, which they're usually very happy when they reach a treatment and aren't progressing, they can turn off trial matching and go on and not think about this until they may need it again in the future. So it's a really comprehensive use of the GreenSpace platform. And some of our more advanced features like consent and treatment capture and surveys. And I'll say one more thing about it. Working with the metastatic breast cancer Alliance and Pfizer, we did a study on the experience of patients with metastatic breast cancer during the COVID pandemic focusing really on the years 2020 and early to mid 2021. And we learned a lot about both where the challenges were, but also some things that happened during COVID that it would behoove the health care system to think really carefully about whether they want to make some of these capabilities more permanently available. And we published a paper with authors from Memorial Sloan Kettering, Greenphire, NBCA, and Pfizer, that really outlined these findings and what we learned from these patients as a result of this study on the NBC Connect platform, which is the Metastatic Breast Cancers Alliance's Registry.
Jimmy Bechtel:That's really cool. We hear all the time about platforms, and they're amazing capabilities and what they could do, but actually hearing it put into practice to again, the kind of the theme of our call here is enabling patients to more successfully be part of the clinical research process and the journey that a lot of them, especially in the metastatic breast cancer and other oncology spaces that don't really have a choice in, in a lot of instances. It's really, really cool to hear about cases like this and positive applications of valuable technology. So thanks for sharing.
Clay Williams:I just have to say it's so gratifying to work with organizations like NBCA. My grandmother, my mom's mom, died of breast cancer when my mom was 12. So this was a grandmother I never knew. But knowing the experience of what my mother went through having her mother have that disease when we got a chance to work with NBCA, I jumped at it. It was just very, very gratifying to work with them. And it is.
Jimmy Bechtel:I couldn't agree more. I'm, sure it was because, like you said earlier, clinical trials eventually impact every single one of us either directly or the by products of what we're able to accomplish in clinical studies. So Clay, we'll start to wrap things up here with our really our last question. And I always like to talk about the future. So what do you envision the role of digital and patient engagement apps like GreenSpace turning into, how do you see them evolving?
Clay Williams:It's a great question. I'm just going to highlight two things. It's a very complicated area, but I want to highlight two things that I think are really important. Number one is we have been fortunate to learn about. Engagement in a way that many people just don't think about it this way. So if you look at digital engagement in general, the goal with some money and tools is to keep people in the app or on the website as much as possible. And that should not be what we are trying to do in healthcare. We want to support people to the extent they need it. We want to make it possible for them to participate fully and comfortably in a clinical trial. And then we want to get out of their way and let them go live their lives. I always tell people, if you come into health care, especially into the research side of it, do not think about engagement and kind of the Facebook slash Twitter model where it's about keeping people on the platform absolutely as much as you can. Think about it more of how do we meet people at the points where they have need and make sure we efficiently meet those needs and let them get on with living after that. The 2nd thing that I think is exciting, and it's very nascent days, and it kind of throws me back to my grad school work is the role of AI in improving the way we engage or can engage with participants. It's a very complicated area. It has implications for how studies or designs, how IRBs think about protocols, et cetera. But what we know is that not everybody in a clinical trial has the same exact needs, so we certainly want a uniform approach to the protocol, the treatment, the arms in the study, but in terms of supporting participants to be able to fully, participate and perform what's needed in a study. I am very curious to see what we may be able to do with some AI technologies as they become available.
Jimmy Bechtel:That seems to be the general sentiment is how do we apply and stay ahead of the curve with future state of the direction that technology is headed with artificial intelligence and the like. So it will be really exciting to see how we can continue to develop digital patient engagement opportunities like GreenSpace for the future of our research patients. So Clay, thank you for being here with us. Thank you for sharing your insights and helping us learn a little bit more about great programs like GreenSpace and the positive effect that they're having on the clinical research enterprise and on patients more importantly. So, again, thank you for being here and sharing this with us today.
Clay Williams:It's really my pleasure to have been here. I appreciate you all having me on the on the podcast.
Jimmy Bechtel:Well, as we wrap up for those listening, don't forget to explore other site focused resources made available to you, like the various publications and webinars on our website, myscrs. org. You'll also find a wealth of content and information and details about our upcoming opportunities and summits, like the SCRS Site Solutions Summit taking place in September down in Hollywood, Florida. Thank you again for listening and until next time.
