EDUCATE. EMPOWER. INSPIRE. CHANGE.
What is CTS?
Girls Computing League developed a Clinical Trial Selector (CTS) that allows patients with records at VA and/or CMS to find clinical trials they are eligible for. Traditional clinical trial databases ask users to enter the relevant medical information directly to use as search criteria. The CTS only requires users to login through their government-issued accounts, and using secure data authorization protocols, it retrieves demographic and clinical information which it then uses to search for relevant trials in available databases, also applying natural language processing to obtain further filtering criteria out of the unstructured eligibility text descriptions.
Visit the site here: https://cts.girlscomputingleague.org/
The Impact
Although the number of clinical trials published on ClinicalTrials.gov has increased significantly in recent years, it is estimated by the Iqvia Institute that clinical trial productivity has decreased by 27% since 2013, largely due to a lack of increased clinical trial participation. Although the medical field has become increasingly industrialized and information has become increasingly globalized, finding an eligible clinical trial still requires either help from a doctor or knowledge of obscure condition codes and other technical information not traditionally accessible to even the most informed patients.
CTS’s automation uniquely simplifies the process of searching for trials thus empowering veterans to better participate in optimizing their care and the care given to others, and increasing the
rate at which life-saving treatments can be discovered.
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Partnership
Deployment
GCL is now working with the VA Innovation team to deploy CTS onto the VA Elastic Cloud (VAEC). Once complete, CTS would be able to support 50 million VA and CMS beneficiaries. GCL has worked with the VA Cloud team to approve of CTS’ aloud architecture and provision government cloud instances.
Outreach
CTS was awarded the 2019 Public Sector Innovation Award, and recieved Honorable Mention at the 2019 VA AI Tech Sprint, the only high school team alongside industry leaders such as Oracle. Since, the GCL team has been invited as speakers to the NAII Brain Summit, where we presented as the only high schoolers among VA researchers and a White House detail.
Featured In
VA Research News: https://www.research.va.gov/currents/1120-AI-tech-sprint-uses-innovation-to-benefit-Veterans.cfm
Health Care IT News: https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/meet-students-trying-simplify-clinical-trial-recruitment-veterans