Why Clinical Trial Screening Stalls on Outside Records

The history that decides eligibility was never on your server

Most eClinical platforms capture data generated during a study: visit data, patient-reported outcomes, protocol labs. They do that well. Most were not built to retrieve the participant's pre-existing records from the outside providers where the actual care happened. That history was never sitting on the site's server.

And that outside history is what determines eligibility. Prior treatments, comorbidities, concomitant medications, historical labs and imaging decide whether a candidate screens in or fails. Until someone retrieves them, they are invisible. A coordinator can spend an afternoon on hold with a hospital records department, only to find the exclusion criterion was sitting in a chart the whole time.

Moving records retrieval to the participant

When the participant connects their own records before screening, the team can see the relevant history up front. That can mean fewer avoidable screen failures, fewer coordinator hours spent on records requests, and a shorter path from consent to enrolled, because history that used to arrive in week three can arrive before day one.

The participant's consent is what makes this work. In Arxova, participants sign the partnering institution's own IRB-approved consent in the app, and only the data they agree to share moves.

Willing to share is not the same as sharing

That gap is mostly friction, not reluctance. When sharing takes a few deliberate steps in an app the person already uses, the data has a path to the team that needs it. More on that in why wearable health data isn't reaching your doctor.

Data collected is not data used

Structured, participant-led history at screening is one way to start shrinking that number: the team collects what the protocol needs, from a source the participant has already assembled.