ideasIdea
A live 'seats available' feed for trial slots, like airline inventory
Trial registries say a study is 'recruiting' long after it stopped, and never say whether a slot is actually open this week. A live feed of open slots per arm and site would let clinicians refer with confidence.
Sponsors and sites publish, via a standard API, per-arm and per-site slot availability updated at least weekly (open, waitlist, closed, expected reopening), consumed by matching tools, genomic report generators and the public registry. Incentive: registries flag trials whose status has not been confirmed within 30 days as 'status unverified'.
Hypothesis
Referrals made against live slot data will convert to enrolment at a higher rate and fewer patients will be referred to closed arms, measured by referral-outcome tracking at participating centres.
Rationale
Stale status is a leading cause of failed referrals and of clinician distrust of matching tools. Inventory visibility solved analogous problems in travel and retail.
What would test it
Pilot with three sponsors and one regional referral network; compare referral-to-enrolment conversion and wasted referrals against the prior year.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
engineering
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks
- Trials enrol too few, too slowly · Fewer than one in ten adults with cancer joins a trial. Trials close for lack of patients, not lack of ideas.
- Data silos · Records, scans, genomes and outcomes sit in separate systems that cannot talk. Every patient's experience is lost to the next.