Why clinical trial recruitment belongs inside the clinical record

Many hospitals that conduct clinical trials still recruit participants manually. A coordinator circulates the inclusion criteria, relies on doctors to remember them, and searches records by hand.

As a result, eligible patients are missed, and those who are identified are often identified late.

MOANA Clinical Research addresses this within the record clinicians already use.

Counts before identities

A research coordinator builds a cohort from inclusion and exclusion criteria, such as a diagnosis, a laboratory value, a medicine or an age range. Moana shows a live count of matching patients, criterion by criterion, before any identity is revealed.

The same criteria can be run across connected facilities to show the number of eligible patients at each site. Only counts are returned, which is the information a sponsor needs to assess where a trial can run.

Identities are shown only to authorised roles, only for an approved study, and every identity view is logged.

Alerts to the treating doctor

When a patient in clinic matches an open trial, the treating doctor sees a banner in the patient chart with the values that matched, and can notify the study coordinator in a single step.

The alert never blocks the consultation, never appears in emergency or triage, and never appears for a patient who has declined research contact.

Research contact preference is recorded at registration. Reception asks once whether the patient may be contacted about research, and that answer applies across the platform.

Consent and research governance

Screening, contact, consent and enrolment are recorded against each candidate, with a record of who acted and why.

Consent is recorded against the approved form version and language, by signature on screen, on paper, or by thumbprint with a witness. Withdrawals are respected in every subsequent search.

Datasets leave the system only with identifiers removed and with the approval of the principal investigator. The audit log is available for review by an ethics committee or an inspector.

Standards

Criteria and exports use ICD 10, SNOMED CT, LOINC and FHIR R4, so a study defined at one hospital has the same meaning at the next.

MOANA Clinical Research is a standalone system on the Moana platform. A hospital or ministry of health can add it without maintaining a second database.